Virtually any kind of content can be naturally expressed as a Fedora digital object. You can also store multiple versions and formats in virtually any combination. Plus you can store information about your content in virtually any form without changing or affecting the original material. Much of Fedora's capability comes from its digital objects. By customizing digital objects you can create new ways to express and access your content-without needing to change any software.
Content in Fedora can easily be accessed from the Web or by your own software applications. Fedora enables you to flexibly access your content (or just parts of it) so you and your collaborators can easily use, fuse (mash-up), and repurpose it in new and innovative ways. You can even work with content outside Fedora, combining it with your own contributions.
The connections between content items can be captured and stored in Fedora as semantic relationships describing both the linkage and its meaning. Combining your own contributions with its relationships to the works of other authors enables you to easily create new works that can, in turn, be stored in Fedora.
You can use Fedora by itself, or as a component of your application or system. You are not "locked in" by any vendor or supplier and are free to make any changes you need to fulfill your goals.
Fedora forms the core of a trusted, preservation-enabled repository. The Fedora team and community actively participates in the rapidly evolving field of digital preservation to support or incorporate "best-of-breed" techniques and components into Fedora, and to enable you to add third-party preservation components into your Fedora system. Fedora enables continuous evolution while keeping your content safe and available.
If it's 10 PM in New York, it's 10 AM in Shanghai. The global community of Fedora developers regularly shares ideas and solutions on the Fedora list-in multiple time zones! Some of the world's most accomplished and innovative developers, librarians, archivists, records managers and content providers collaborate on an ongoing basis to improve Fedora.
Fedora is the first open source repository designed to work as part of an extensible framework of service components. This means you can seamlessly incorporate Fedora into your organization's existing infrastructure. This also means the Fedora community can easily contribute service components that you can just use. There is a growing body of service components from which you can select or customize for deployment in your system. And you are invited to develop your own service components that we hope (but do not require) you will contribute back to the community.
Fedora 2.2.1 is the tenth release of the software since 2003 based on community input. Fedora 3.0 is planned for release in the fall of 2007, plus Fedora is already funded to provide future releases.
With Fedora you can build a system that scales from a single-server to the largest organizational multi-server system. You can start small and gradually evolve your system as your needs (and funding) become clearer while protecting your investment and, more importantly, your valuable content.
Fedora supports trusted, secure organizational repository needs while enabling rapidly changing Web mash-up applications. Fedora's standards-based framework can incorporate the latest technology while keeping the content safe and accessible. Using this framework, you can easily add innovative technologies as services or plug-ins without compromising the trusted core. And you can safely free your Web developers to come up with their own new applications using Fedora's simple Web interfaces.