Fluor: Your connection to the Fedora Digital Objects Repository

Roland Groen, Edia

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Overview

• Project goals & drivers• History of the project• Short walkthrough• Overall Architecture• The features of the fluor tool• Setting up a collection• Project Status

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Project Goals

• Make researchers share research data in a controlled community• Integrate Sakai with the Fedora Content

Repository• Support searching and browsing• Support different access models• Open vs. closed

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Project Drivers

• UvA Library: make researchers aware of the importance of sharing data

• Making research data publically available becomes more and more a requirement than a wish

• Publishing: Support publications by disseminate the underlying research data

• Teaching: have students work with actual research data

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A BIT OF HISTORYAnd now...

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Project history: testweeklab

• ‘Testweeklab’ project (2008)• Work with 40 years of privacy sensitive research data• Strong security requirements

• Only metadata (publically) accessible• Complicated access procedure for accessing the actual

data• Very specific metadata schema, search and browse

requirements• Very specific fields (year, N, type of test, scale)

• Build as Sakai tool for connecting to a Fedora repository

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Project history: next steps

• Findings from testweeklab• User Interaction improvements• Configurability

• Support more types of usage• Make the tool flexible to support different

collections and types of use• Make the access model flexible• Support personalization

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A SHORT FUNCTIONAL WALKTHROUGH

And now…

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Searching

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Browsing

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My Items

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Upload

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THE OVERVIEW OF THE ARCHITECTURE

And now...

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Overall architecture

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Overall architecture: components

• Fedora: act as a content repository.• Generic search: do the updates and

transformations to Solr• Solr: indexing, provide a search and

browse interface• Sakai FLUOR tool: create a UI for

researchers to work with

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Fedora

• Content repository• Content managed as data objects• Unique identifier: PID• Metadata• Datastreams

• Relation between objects• Virtual datastreams• Versioning, logging• Multiple collections• Objects handled as XML (FOXML)

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Fedora generic search

• Enables browsing and search with Lucene, Solr and Zebra

• Gets notifications about updates from Fedora and fetches the objects

• XSLT transforms FOXML into documents for the search engine

• a Rest and SOAP interface, search and browse based on SRW/SRU.

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Solr

• Search engine• Build on top of Lucene• Easy to deploy and configure• Advanced full-text searching and indexing• Open interfaces, Rest, JSON, XML• Admin interfaces• Plugin architecture

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THE FLUOR TOOLAnd now…

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Fluor tool features

• Access research data• Search and browse• Access items in the repository• Create favorites• Upload new items• Added directly depending on security model

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• Data access security model• Metadata is always accessible• Access on datastreams is limited• Open: no restrictions• Request based: user needs to create a request,

and admin reviews them.

Fluor tool features

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Fluor tool features

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Fluor tool features

• The access model is configurable. • Open• Request based• Per object configurable

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Fluor tool features

• Support for versioning• Enables the download of previous versions.

• Configurable

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Fluor tool features

• Data encryption• The ability to encrypt datastreams• Backups etc. cause no threat to privacy• Configurable on the datastream

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SETTING UP A REPOSITORY

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Setting up a collection

• Describe the collection• What datastreams are there?• What metadata is there?

• Set up the Fedora repository• Configure the Fedora datamodel• Set up generic search and Solr

• Configure the FLUOR tool

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Setting up a collection

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THE STATUS OF THE PROJECTAnd now…

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Project status

• The project is currently being tested by targeted end-users• Common UI bugs and issues• Search and index has problems

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Solr vs. Generic search

• Generic search 2.2• Browse functionality broken with Solr. • Does not use facet browsing, instead access

lucene index on file system. • Browse not limited to collection, results polluted.

• Solution: Access Solr directly instead of generic search

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ANY QUESTIONS?An finally…

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THANK YOU!