DfR Design Threads

Requirements
DfR must be targeted at researcher's real needs or it will not be used. This requires us to find out what those needs are and see how to meet them. This is an area that has many unknowns and it is easy to make false assumptions. But simply asking researchers what they want will not work since DfR is not bespoke software automating well known processes. It is a creative work that imagines what could be a good infrastructure for researchers. So we must create a design that is innovative but still grounded in satisfying real needs. In particular, we anticipate a new research life cycle that includes retaining and curating valuable data for future researchers. Since we are designing a software infrastructure in the face of many unknowns we must use methodologies that help this project to reduce false assumptions and produce value. This section contains the work products of the agile requirements development methodologies that guide this project. In particular, this process is guided by Minimum Viable Products methods that balance ideas with reality.

Security

Provisioning

Object Creation
When new content is uploaded to DfR (via DuraCloud), it is uploaded as a bytestream having a limited amount of metadata in itself. Also, DuraCloud operates with semantics appropriate to a bytestream, a desirable characteristic since this creates a logical separation of concerns between storage-like containers and containers that perform other functions. In DfR, a key container/service family is the Fedora Repository. It is able to support a richer set of semantics for marking up and relating bytestreams to other content. To do this, however, Fedora Digital Objects, using the FOXML schema, must be created encapsulating the uploaded bytestreams (stored in DuraCloud).

Clients
A client is any stand-alone service, component or application that interoperates with any DfR-related interface. The client may operate via any supported protocol directly or via an application having a user interface. Clients, particularly applications or orchestrations, may use several DfR related protocols in a coordinated fashion.

Architecture

Technologies
DfR is conceived as an applied "infrastructure" research and developments project. In any such project it is best to minimize new development and use existing off-the-shelf technologies to the greatest degree possible. Technologies can be used as a basis for development or as integration of components within an overarching architecture. This section lists the technologies that were considered as part of this project.

Data Model