- Recognised early on that this would be foundational
-
Fedora was selected after considering its
merits relative to DSpace and a number of other candidates for a number
of reasons:
- ARROW needed something it
could
build on top of (like Fedora)
- rather
than an existing application (like DSpace)
- The object-oriented data
model for Fedora was much more flexible
- as opposed to DSpace's Repository-Community-Collection-Item-Bitstream hierarchy
- ARROW wanted to be able to
have persistent identifiers down to
the level of individual datastreams
- DSpace only has such identifiers
for the item
- As of DSpace 1.2, bitstreams in DSpace also have more 'persistent'
identifiers, but they are still more volatile than Handles
- ARROW wanted to be able to
version both content and disseminators (which can be thought of as
software behaviours for content)
- DSpace versions neither content nor disseminators
- The APIs are exposed much
more openly and cleanly in Fedora (as
well-documented SOAP/REST web services)
- DSpace uses (at the time poorly
documented) Java APIs
- BUT, we have agreed to review this decision every 12 months
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