Tuesday August 12, 2008

Transformations in the Repository Stack

Yesterday Sandy Payette, Executive Director of Fedora Commons, spoke to the Red Island Repository Institute.  I twittered regarding a comment she made to the effect that content transformations should logically be moved farther down the repository stack.  Several people wrote to me to ask about it.  I'm afraid I have little more to add to her statement other than to point out that she offered Sun Honeycomb as evidence of the trend toward pushing those processes lower.  My understanding of her position is that it's logical to transform the data closer to where it lives rather than moving it out of storage and into the access application layer and then making the transformation.

Another interesting follow-on conversation involved the scope of Fedora and repositories in general.  Declan Fleming, Director of Information Technology at UC San Diego Libraries, questioned the broadness of scope and resulting complexity of Fedora.  This reminded me of a train of thought I'd been following prior to the RIRI- There's a great deal of overlap between the layers in a typical repository stack.  iRods,a storage layer, provides functionality covered by Fedora, the repository layer, which provides functionality provided by Fez, the access layer.  This is a simple example that got me thinking about where specific functions should occur.  Of course, these layers weren't designed solely to interact with one another and shouldn't be expected to integrate perfectly, but it's a useful exercise to consider the most logical location for processes.