Our digital repository will need to interoperate with other repositories. There are many types of interoperability. Our current concerns focus on:

Spiders and other Web Crawlers

The spider that concerns us most is Web Spiders, since it uses far more bandwidth than others.

Asset Actions

Asset actions (formerly called asset definitions) are a way to provide interoperability between repositories, whether Fedora-based or not. An asset definition provides a mapping between a standard set of "actions" and URLs that perform those actions for a given object.

• Asset Action Example
• (Outdated) asset definition example
• Obtaining multiple views of resources in an OAI context - writeup by Tim Cole @ UIUC describing asset definition experiment
• Asset Action Demonstration Portal at UIUC
  • Note: To see UVA Collector tool in action, do a search, switch to the Thumbnails view, then right-click on images and choose "Add to Collection"

Pathways

Pathways is still very much under development, so this information may be outdated...

The Pathways project seeks to build an interoperability layer on top of several different repositories. It is much more abstract than Asset Actions.

Pathways defines three primary interfaces:

• Obtain interface – get a "surrogate" of the digital object (datastreams are referenced, not included). This is likely to be OpenURL.
• Harvest interface – get a set of surrogates based on some properties (e.g., objects updated since my last harvest). This is likely to be OAI-PMH, RSS, or Atom.
• Put interface – (a better name may be "queue for ingest") request placement of a new digital object into the repository

Information about Pathways:

• Mellon Meeting Final Report
• Data Model slides

Questions:

• Why doesn't the hasLineage relationship have a type indicator? It would be useful to know how the lineage was used to create the object. Or should this information be stored somewhere else in the object?

SRU

See the SRU page.

OAI

See the OAI page.