...

Release Manager

Andrew Woods

Developers

• Yinlin Chen
• Unknown User (acoburn)
• Esmé Cowles
• Osman Din
• Michael Durbin
• Peter Eichman
• James R. Griffin III
• Unknown User (daniel-dgi)
• Mohamed Mohideen Abdul Rasheed
• Nick Ruest
• Miroslav Simek
• A. Soroka
• Jared Whiklo
• Andrew Woods

Issue Reporters

• Yinlin Chen
• Unknown User (acoburn)
• Esmé Cowles
• Justin Coyne
• Osman Din
• Michael Durbin
• Peter Eichman
• Unknown User (daniel-dgi)
• Mohamed Mohideen Abdul Rasheed
• Nick Ruest
• Rob Sanderson
• Miroslav Simek
• A. Soroka
• Trey Pendragon
• Joshua Westgard
• Jared Whiklo
• Andrew Woods

Summary

The Fedora 4.4.0 release furthers several major objectives:

• Tighten the definition of the RESTful application programming interface (API)
• Further align this API to community standards, including the Linked Data Platform [3] (LDP) and Web Access Control [4] (WebAC)
• Improve tooling for legacy Fedora repositories to Fedora4
• Improve tooling for external services live in the ecosystem around the repository
• Fix bugs

...

To minimize the barriers to using Fedora, a free, opensource open source application, there is no required "registration" process. However, it is extremely beneficial to the broader Fedora community if we collectively aggregate some minimal details describing our respective repository installations.

DuraSpace maintains a registry [7] of installations that is populated on a voluntary basis. The 4.4.0 release raises the visibility of that registry, and hopefully the likelihood that repository managers will self-register [8] in it, by adding a link on the Fedora installation spashsplash-page requesting exactly that.

...

Application Programming Interface

One of the technical priorities [9] of Fedora is to define a well-specified application programming interface (API) against which client applications can be written and future server-side implementations can be created. This Fedora API should be clear and detailed enough such that a cooresponding corresponding technology compatibility kit [10] (TCK) would be able to indicate if the any Fedora implementation fullfills fulfills or diverges from the specification. With this in mind, several issues where were addressed in this release that clean up Fedora's RESTful interaction and tease out the non-core aspects of the Fedora ontology [11].

...

A primary focus of the ongoing Fedora effort is to facilitate the upgrade/migration of Fedora3 repositories to Fedora4. To those endsthis end, a couple of improvements have been incorporated into the "migration-utils [12]" upgration utility.

• Enable the migration source to include Fedora2Add Fedora2 to the configurable list of migration sources
• Map legacy PIDs to user-defined Fedora4 predicates, versus the previous dc:identifier mapping

...

One of the exciting capabilities that Fedora enables is the creation of distributed, asynchronous, message-driven services that are external to the core repository but are triggered by repository events. This release further improves the deployment and runtime configurability of the Fedora-related Apache Camel-based [13] features. 

...

A significant community success that is found in this release is an initial implementation of an Web Access Control [14] authorization module. This authorization module enables the establishment of access policies modeled as linked data. This feature was initiated, planned, designed, and implemented by a group of community stakeholders.

...

Numerous refactorings, bugfixes, and clean-up tasks were addressed in this release. Some of the highlights include:

• ...

References

[1]  https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/Downloads
[2]  http://docs.fcrepo.org
[3]  http://www.w3.org/TR/ldp/
[4]  http://www.w3.org/wiki/WebAccessControl
[5]  https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FEDORA44/RESTful+HTTP+API+-+Fixity
[6]  https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FEDORA44/RESTful+HTTP+API+-+Export+and+Import
[7]  http://www.duraspace.org/registry/fedora
[8]  http://www.duraspace.org/register-repository
[9]  https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/2015+-+2016+Technical+Priorities
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_Compatibility_Kit
[11] http://fedora.info/definitions/v4/2015/07/24/repository
[12] https://github.com/fcrepo4-exts/migration-utils
[13] http://camel.apache.org/
[14] http://www.w3.org/wiki/WebAccessControl