While other Cornellians have been building online repositories of scholarship and history, a few information scientists at Cornell and the University of Virginia have been developing a better way to build repositories with an open-source software package called Fedora (for Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture).

Their work took a big step forward Aug. 13 when a $4.9 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation enabled the creation of a nonprofit organization, named Fedora Commons, to further develop and promote the software.

Like other digital repository software, such as DSpace, Fedora offers a way to manage large collections of information and display them on the Web, working with data stored in a wide variety of formats and geographic locations. But Fedora also provides a software platform upon which new types of scholarly communication and publishing systems can be built. It can be used to manage a collaborative process, for example saving versions of an evolving scholarly work or capturing annotations about scientific publications.

"The mission is to have a dual identity, both to act as an archive for any type of digital media and to provide an infrastructure to interconnect and re-use," explains Sandy Payette, executive director of Fedora Commons and a researcher in Cornell Information Science who created Fedora in 2001. "The challenge before us is to manage what is arguably a new form of document, where multiple resources such as an article, a dataset and digital images are all connected to form a larger whole that is a unified publication in its own right."

Over 100 systems worldwide already use Fedora, including the National Science Digital Library, a National Science Foundation (NSF) project that makes primary scientific resources and associated teaching tools available to teachers nationwide; the Public Library of Science open-access journal publishing system; the Chicago Historical Society's Encyclopedia of Chicago; and repositories at the University of Virginia, Tufts University, the National Library of Wales, the University of Athens, and a new e-scholarship system for the Max Planck Institute.

Fedora works with data in a wide variety of formats by treating each collection as a set of "digital objects" that can interact with other objects in the same way, no matter what format the material inside them may take. The format can even be changed without changing the relationships already set up between digital objects. The objects can contain metadata (data about data), and Fedora can translate that between the several different formats used by librarians, scientists and others.

Initially funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration and the NSF, Fedora evolved into a collaborative open-source software project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and was further developed by a team of programmers at Cornell and the University of Virginia. The new Fedora Commons organization will continue to be housed at Cornell, and Fedora Commons will contract with Cornell for the continued services of the existing team of Fedora programmers, in collaboration with colleagues in Virginia and an international community of contributors.

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, based in San Francisco, supports environmental conservation and cutting-edge science around the world.