Hi Andrew. I'm quite new to working with Fedora, too, but I've got similar needs I think.
My understanding of the special RELS-EXT RDF-XML datastream is that it is strictly limited to making assertions in which the subjects are Fedora objects (though there are no restrictions on predicates and objects). See https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FCR30/Digital+Object+Relationships This restriction may or may not be a concern for you. So you may therefore use external authority files, thesauri, etc, or you may choose to model your contextual entities as Fedora objects. In a project I'm working on, we are doing both. Andrew Green <andrew.green...@gmail.com> wrote: Hi, all, I'm just learning Fedora Commons and have a question about metadata modeling. As far as I can tell, the standard XML metadata stream does not provide much structure for metadata---it seems that, normally, the values of metadata properties are just stored as strings. So, for example, a reference to an author would not point to a unique author identifier, but would just store the person's name as a string. Is this correct? So are RDF streams the place Fedora offers for storing structured data in general? I understand that this is for relationships within and among digital objects. This is great (and completely aligned with the project I've been working on---see below) though many, many of the entities I need to define relationships to (like people, institutions, places, thesaurus terms and external publications) would not normally be considered "digital objects" in the repository. What is the standard practice here for working with data in a structured manner, including the modification and addition of data? Does one keep a copy of everything in a relational database or some external tool, and export it to the flat XML format on a regular basis? Or does one store structured metadata in RDF streams, and create digital objects for everything, including things that aren't stored in the repository in any way? Or not, and just reference non-digital-objects (like people and places) from the RDF in the Fedora repository, and use a separate RDF store for additional triples describing those objects? And in the case of either of these two RDF-centered approaches, what systems might one use for modifying/maintaining/creating the metadata? To give you an idea of where I'm coming from, let me say a bit about the project I work on: over the course of several years, we've created a few versions of a Semantic Web-based repository system, focused on the specific needs of photograph archives researched and disseminated by the institution we're based at. You can see the results of our work at http://lais.mora.edu.mx/ff/. To see how structured data works for us in our complex, specific (though standards-based) metadata format, go to the "Catálogo" tab, and try searches for "centro", "roca" or "plano". (In Spanish only, I'm afraid; but if you know at least a bit of any Romance language, you can probably get the gist of what's going on.) Our system, called Pescador, works for our Web site, but is limited in many ways. We're now making plans for the future development of this system, and are considering ways of integrating what we've done with the wider ecosystem of free software archival systems, which has really grown up since we started our work. You can see our source code---all GPL'd---at http://lais.mora.edu.mx/svn/pescador/trunk/. Many thanks in advance for your help (and apologies if the answers to my questions are already available somewhere that I should have seen and haven't), greetings, Andrew Green ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ EditLive Enterprise is the world's most technically advanced content authoring tool. Experience the power of Track Changes, Inline Image Editing and ensure content is compliant with Accessibility Checking. http://p.sf.net/sfu/ephox-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Fedora-commons-users mailing list Fedora-commons-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fedora-commons-users ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ EditLive Enterprise is the world's most technically advanced content authoring tool. Experience the power of Track Changes, Inline Image Editing and ensure content is compliant with Accessibility Checking. http://p.sf.net/sfu/ephox-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Fedora-commons-users mailing list Fedora-commons-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fedora-commons-users
