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          SI2: Improve interoperability between SRB and Fedora

          SI2 Report [PDF 73Kb]. 

          Objectives

          Not all large dataset environments should be, or will want to be, integrated into Fedora. The original DART bid envisaged that it would therefore also be necessary to ensure interoperability between these non-Fedora repositories and existing institutional repositories. The objective of this work package was to improve interoperability between Storage Resource Broker (SRB) based environments and Fedora. It proposed three related activities to achieve this:

          • Investigate use of Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) to exchange archived resources between systems
          • Develop authenticity management between federated systems
          • Implement ability for Fedora to reference SRB-based stores as externally-managed datastreams.

          In practice, none of these activities were performed in DART for the reasons described below. The DART bid actually anticipated work that was undertaken (or is about to be undertaken) by other projects.

          Overview

          The DART project worked with Fedora and SRB based repositories. It was anticipated that not all large dataset environments should be, or would want to be, integrated into Fedora. The project therefore felt it would be necessary to ensure interoperability between these non-Fedora repositories and existing institutional repositories. This interoperability would need to be achieved in a number of different ways to accommodate different situations. One would be the ability to exchange archived resources between systems, both over time and as researchers moved between systems. SI2 proposed to investigate using the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) to achieve this. A second approach would be to develop authenticity management between federated systems, to allow for authenticated exchange of information. The third approach was to implement the ability for Fedora to reference SRB-based stores as externally-managed datastreams. This would allow one repository to manage information stored in another. Obviously this latter approach was closely related to the work done in workpackage SI1.