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1. It supports the creation and management of digital content objects (from this point on called digital objects) that can aggregate data from multiple sources. For example, a digital object might be a set of tiff images that are the individual page images of a scanned document. The data sources may be either locally managed within the Fedora software or sourced from another URL accessible network server. The data sources may be content or metadata. You may think of these digital objects as advanced digital documents, especially in light of the feature described next. //
2. It supports the association of web services with the digital objects. These services typically consume the data packaged within the digital object to produce dynamic disseminations from the digital object. For example, the digital object described above with multiple tiff page images may be associated with a service that OCRs the images that are components of the digital object and disseminates an HTML version of the pages. The services may be either local to the machine of the respective Fedora server or sourced from another network accessible server that is addressable via a URL. In this manner, Fedora acts as a mediation layer that coordinates local and distributed data and web services within a uniform framework. This is illustrated in Figure 1.
3. It provides uniform access web-based interfaces to these digital objects, through REST requests and more powerful SOAP-based methods. These interfaces consist of a set of built-in methods to access characteristics common to all digital objects such as key metadata and internal structure. These include a method to introspect on an object to reveal the set of methods that constitute the extended behavior of that object. For example, a client could use these built-in methods to "learn" about the capability of the digital object described above to dynamically disseminate an HTML page from a set of tiff images.
   The benefits of these are two-fold:
   1. Clients accessing Fedora digital objects can rely on uniform access regardless of the nature of the object.
   2. The disseminations available from an object are independent of the internal structure of the object. For example, the client interface of the example above in which HTML is disseminated from a set of source tiff pages could remain constant regardless of whether the underlying object contained tiff images, jpeg, pdf, or even simple static HTML. This gives the content developer great freedom to modify a repository's internals without disrupting the client and user views of the content.
4. It presents a uniform and powerful REST and SOAP-based management interface. All internal operations of the repository such as object creation and management are available through these APIs, providing the hooks for integrating Fedora into a variety of environments. These makes Fedora useful as the foundation for advanced content management applications
5. It includes a comprehensive versioning framework that tracks the evolution of objects and provides access to earlier versions.
6. It includes a basic relationship framework for representing the links among digital objects.
7. It supports ingest and export of digital objects in a variety of XML formats. This enables interchange between Fedora and other XML-based applications and facilitates archiving tasks.

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