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This roadmap will be documented in several forms. The master and most complete form will be located on the Fedora Commons Web site. Using a Web site permits us to create a set of linked documents that the reader may explore based on interest and depth. The roadmap will also be published in a document form that is more condensed. Finally, the roadmap will be provided as an executive summary.

Themes and Priorities

Introduction

In this section we capture the needs of our community that Fedora Commons will address. These needs are expressed as a set of high level requirements found in the systems which members or organizations in our community are building or intend to build. These system requirements are captured from descriptions of our community's applications, scenarios of use (also called use cases) and experience with their existing systems, combined with imagination of innovations which we can enable. We have collected these requirements into "Themes" as an aid in understanding related sets of requirements. Themes provide a way to classify our community's needs, and may include both specific functionality and general characteristics like performance, scaling and robustness.
For the initial version of this roadmap we will use the Eclipse classification of Themes to help indicate priority. Themes are described in one of four categories (from the Eclipse 2007 Roadmap):

• Active themes are those that are ongoing and changing. From time to time, some Active themes will become Persistent and Pervasive.
• Persistent and Pervasive themes are not time or release specific. Persistent and Pervasive themes are not only a signal of importance, but permanence.
• Deferred Themes are not an indication of priority, but are an indication that there are technical or resource inhibitors preventing them from becoming an Active Theme. Deferred themes are a signal to the ecosystem that help is needed.
• Pending Themes are new and interesting themes that have not yet been properly explored and discussed to become an Active theme.

Active Themes

• Data curation and data archives
  • Durable digital objects
  • Preservation enabled archives
• Re-use and interoperability
  • Of scientific and scholarly objects
  • Enablement through standards and protocols especially via OAI-ORE
  • Repository interoperability
• Access and Publication
  • Integration of datasets with publications
  • Open Access
  • Durable linkage, annotation and citation
  • Sharing of historic scientific journals and data in support of improved scholarly/scientific communication
• Semantic Technology
  • Innovative uses of semantic technologies for scientific and scholarly collaboration
  • Graph-Orientation
  • Object-Triple Mapping and Query Technology
  • RDF Database (triple-store) Technology
• Infrastructure, Integration and Deployment Technologies
  • Transactions, Journaling, Backing Replication
  • Storage sub-system integration (transactional and special purpose, file/bitstream/blob)
  • Ease of deployment, serviceability and manageability of large scale installations
  • Middleware, Messaging and Workflow/Business Process Execution (Enterprise Readiness)
  • Repository and Middleware security
• Ease of use
  • Support for simple applications with low barriers to entry (solution bundles)
  • Lightweight and Web interfaces
  • Improved business object generation and persistence
  • Model-driven Content Management

Persistent and Pervasive Themes

• Performance and Scalability
  • Large scale collections

• • Support for dissemination caching and high speed access architectures
  • Large bitstream handling
• Evolvability and Extensibility
• Accessibility Compliance (US Section 508 and equivalents)
• Internationalization and Localization

Deferred Themes

• Applications and Solutions
  • Vertical content authoring and creation applications
  • Digital Asset Management, Media Asset Management, Web Content Management, WIKI, and Blogging
• Application security
• Format identification and validation, format registries, format migration
• Authenticity

Pending Themes

• Persistent Identifiers and Alternate Identifiers
• Federation
  • Object Identifier-Resolver systems
  • Update Consistency
  • Replication
  • Locking (single object and graphs)
  • User Identity and Security Management
• High Availability and Disaster Recovery
  • Clustering
  • Failover
• Trusted Archive Enablement
• Bulk Ingest
  • Batch Ingest
  • Pipelined Ingest
• Innovations in new ways of exposing and accessing content

Release Plans

Projects

Fedora Commons' software development has been divided into multiple projects, each producing core components or services. We are moving in a direction of Fedora Commons being the home for a set of inter-related open source software projects that produce components or software libraries that fit nicely into solution bundles or for integration into larger information systems. Software projects under the Fedora Commons umbrella must develop components or software libraries for use cases that are consistent with the Fedora Commons mission. Unlike Apache, which has many projects targeted at many different purposes, all Fedora Commons projects are synergistic and are intended to fit together. However, separate projects provide for better management and tracking. Fedora Commons uses software engineering methodologies and appropriate community governance mechanisms to help ensure that the components and libraries may be easily integrated. This is an evolving process as the organization and its software engineering methodologies matures.

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