Abstract
Making data findable, accessible, interoperable, and re-usable is an important but challenging goal. From an infrastructure perspective, repository technologies play a key role in supporting FAIR data principles. Fedora is a flexible, extensible, open source repository platform for managing, preserving, and providing access to digital content. Fedora is used in a wide variety of institutions including libraries, museums, archives, and government organizations. Fedora provides native linked data capabilities and a modular architecture based on well-documented APIs and ease of integration with existing applications. As both a project and a community, Fedora has been increasingly focused on research data management, making it well-suited to supporting FAIR data principles as a repository platform. Fedora provides strong support for persistent identifiers, both by minting HTTP URIs for each resource and by allowing any number of additional identifiers to be associated with resources as RDF properties. Fedora also supports rich metadata in any schema that can be indexed and disseminated using a variety of protocols and services. As a linked data server, Fedora allows resources to be semantically linked both within the repository and on the broader web. Along with these and other features supporting research data management, the Fedora community has been actively participating in related initiatives, most notably the Research Data Alliance. Fedora representatives participate in a number of interest and working groups focused on requirements and interoperability for research data repository platforms. This participation allows the Fedora project to both influence and be influenced by an international group of Research Data Alliance stakeholders. This paper will describe how Fedora supports FAIR data principles, both in terms of relevant features and community participation in related initiatives.
Highlights
Fedora is built around the notion of flexibility; content can be modeled in a variety of different ways to support both simple and complex use cases
Fedora is interoperable; it has been designed around a robust REST-API and an event-based messaging service that establish welldocumented patterns for integrating Fedora with other applications and services to build a larger system (Technical Specifications, 2018)
Each principle has an associated list of criteria which can be aligned with the relevant Fedora features in order to demonstrate how Fedora can effectively support the FAIR Data principles
Summary
The Flexible, Extensible, Digital Object Repository Architecture, is open source repository software that stores, preserves, and provides access to digital content. Fedora is built around the notion of flexibility; content can be modeled in a variety of different ways to support both simple and complex use cases. Fedora is built around the notion of flexibility; content can be modeled in a variety of different ways to support both simple and complex use cases. This flexibility is primarily based on linked data. Fedora uses Resource Description Framework (RDF) triples to create semantic links between resources, thereby allowing for data models unrestricted by traditional file and folder hierarchies Along with this flexibility, Fedora supports millions of resources, both large and small, with configurable storage capabilities. Most institutions turn to Fedora for its flexibility — while local use cases may start out relatively simple, they will inevitably grow more complex over time. Each principle has an associated list of criteria which can be aligned with the relevant Fedora features in order to demonstrate how Fedora can effectively support the FAIR Data principles
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