Release date: 12 October, 2015
We are proud to announce the release of Fedora 4.4.0.
The Fedora 4.4.0 release furthers several major objectives:
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To minimize the barriers to using Fedora, a free, 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 splash-page requesting exactly that.
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 corresponding technology compatibility kit [10] (TCK) would be able to indicate if any Fedora implementation fulfills or diverges from the specification. With this in mind, several issues were addressed in this release that clean up Fedora's RESTful interaction and tease out the non-core aspects of the Fedora ontology [11].
Fedora is a Linked Data Platform (LDP) server implementation. This release fixes a few bugs that relate to the interactions that an LDP client should expect.
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A primary focus of the ongoing Fedora effort is to facilitate the upgrade/migration of Fedora3 repositories to Fedora4. To this end, a couple of improvements have been incorporated into the "migration-utils [12]" upgration utility.
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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.
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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.
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Numerous refactorings, bugfixes, and clean-up tasks were addressed in this release:
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[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 |