The Fedora Repository Project and the Fedora Commons community forum are under the stewardship of the DuraSpace not-for-profit organization.
Fedora (Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture) was originally developed by researchers at Cornell University as an architecture for storing, managing, and accessing digital content in the form of digital objects inspired by the Kahn and Wilensky Framework. Fedora defines a set of abstractions for expressing digital objects, asserting relationships among digital objects, and linking "behaviors" (i.e., services) to digital objects.
The Fedora Repository Project (i.e., Fedora) implements the Fedora abstractions in a robust open source software system. Fedora provides a core repository service (exposed as web-based services with well-defined APIs). In addition, Fedora provides an array of supporting services and applications including search, OAI-PMH, messaging, administrative clients, and more. Fedora provides RDF support and the repository software is integrated with semantic triple store technology, including the Mulgara RDF database. Fedora helps ensure that digital content is durable by providing features that support digital preservation.
The Fedora Commons refers to the community surrounding the Fedora Repository Project. This community joins together with common needs, use cases, and projects. The Fedora Commons community is very active in producing additional tools, applications, and utilities that augment the Fedora repository. Many of these creations are available to the entire community as open source.
The Fedora Repository software has been installed by institutions, worldwide, to support a variety of digital content needs. The Fedora Repository is extremely flexible and can be used to support any type of digital content. There are numerous examples of Fedora being used for digital collections, e-research, digital libraries, archives, digital preservation, institutional repositories, open access publishing, document management, digital asset management, and more. The following is a short categorical list of the types of organizations in the Fedora Commons user community (alphabetically ordered):
- broadcasting and media
- consortia
- corporations
- government agencies
- IT-related institutions
- medical centers and libraries
- museums and cultural organizations
- national and public libraries and archives
- professional societies
- publishing
- research groups and projects
- semantic and virtual library projects
- university libraries and archives
