Stefano Cossu is a data and application architect for the Art Institute of Chicago's Collections. In this presentation, screened at the Open Repositories 2014 conference, he explains the Museum's long-range plan for Digital Asset Management leveraging the new features offered by the Fedora 4 open source repository system (https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF). Presentation can be viewed on vimeo: https://vimeo.com/98736678

1. Fedora 4 as a Shared Linked Data
Repository for the AIC Collections
Stefano Cossu, Director of Application Services – The Art Institute of Chicago – scossu@artic.edu
Open Repositories Conference 2014, Helsinki, Finland

2. The AIC Collections
l 250,000 art objects in Collections
l Several millions of image and text assets
l Many different departments access these data
l 11 Curatorial depts.
l Registrar
l Conservation
l Imaging
l Publications
l Help Desk
l Etc.

3. Goals
l Build a scalable asset repository
l Create a pool of shared, linked information
l Move toward a de-centralized, asynchronous
architecture
l Maintain current CMS as the main management
platform
l Standardize data formats

4. Why Fedora?
l Scalable and reliable
l Interface agnostic
l Content agnostic
l Modular, distributed
l Community driven

5. Fedora 4: a hard decision
l We built a F3 proof of concept, then moved to F4
l F4 features are very helpful to our mission
l F3 had the guarantee of stability
l Some features won't be available soon in F4
l Starting with F3 and migrating to F4 later would have
been very time-consuming

6. Fedora 4 Key Features for AIC
l Federation of external sources
l Asynchronous content processing (Sequencers)
l Powerful REST API
l Clustering
l Completely RDF-based
l Based on a reliable storage engine (Modeshape)

7. Use case proposals
Functionality we plan to build around F4 features:
l Building a pool (or better, a LAKE) of shared data
l Large file ingestion
l Content modeling

8. Use case 1: LAKE – Linked Asset
and Knowledge Ecosystem

9. LAKE Gateways to Shared Data

10. AIC Departments with Access Roles

11. Non-Shared Data

12. Federate WWW Resources

13. Use Case 2: Ingesting Large Files
Users upload assets to remote FS

14. Manifest file triggers ingestion

15. Derivative generation and metadata

16. Use Case 3: Content Modeling

17. RDF relationships

18. Thank you
For further discussion:
• Fedora 4 Wiki: https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF
• Discuss on Google Groups: Fedora Tech
• E-mail me: scossu@artic.edu
• Visit the Art Institute of Chicago Collections online:
http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections