Fedora is an acronym for the Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture. The Fedora Repository is very flexible; it is capable of serving as a digital content repository for a wide variety of uses. Among these are digital asset management, institutional repositories, digital archives, content management systems, scholarly publishing enterprises, and digital libraries. The Fedora Repository is able to store any sort of digital content item such as documents, videos, data sets, computer files, images plus it can store information (often called metadata) about the content items in any format. In addition, the relationships between content items can be stored - which is often as important as the content items themselves. You can choose to store just the metadata and relationships for content which is held by another organization or system. The Fedora Repository is a product of Fedora Commons, a non-profit organization whose mission is to provide technology that enables durable storage and access to the digital content that increasingly records our cultural and scientific heritage. The Fedora Repository like all Fedora Commons products is provided as free, open-source software under the Apache 2.0 license.
The Fedora Repository is designed to be a component that may be easily integrated into an application or system that provides additional functions which satisfy a particular end-user’s or organization’s needs. While the Fedora Repository is capable operating as a standalone content server, it is really designed for use with other software. In most cases, the Fedora Repository will only part of a complete content solution which will incorporate other components such as authoring or ingest applications, search engines, workflow management, and security components such as user identity management.
Since Fedora is so flexible, integration with other software is easy and there are a number of benefits to Fedora’s component-based architecture. One of these benefits is that you can use the same repository for many applications enabling a high degree of integration for your content, avoiding islands of information, without having to change your applications. Another benefit is that you control your content assets without any vendor lock-in. There are many other benefits to this approach that we will describe later in this tutorial.
A key part of the Fedora Commons mission is to enable durable access to content. We have all experienced the inability to access content items even a few years old. The Fedora Repository enables technology that aids organizations in stewardship of the content they host.
