A presentation given at the Open Repositories conference in 2015 held in Indianapolis described thus, provide an update on progress to date, At the University of Alberta Libraries we are currently developing a Digital Asset Management System (‘Hydra North’, built on Hydra and Fedora 4) to bring all of our digital assets into one platform for discovery, access and preservation. The metadata underlying these repositories has been created according to many standards (DC, MODS, EAD, etc.) and varies in level of fullness and overall quality. We find ourselves at a ‘metadata crossroads’ as we attempt to bring this disparate metadata together. We see a solution in a move to RDF and the application of the principles of linked data. In this presentation we will discuss some of the initial questions we asked ourselves as we tried to fully grasp what the move to RDF and linked data would mean for our existing metadata, provide concrete examples of the thought processes and workflows involved in moving from existing non-RDF metadata to RDF, based on the principles of linked data, outline some of the decisions we made along the way, and why, and what the impact has been, and reflect on lessons learned and outline next steps.
A proposal for a presentation given at the Open Repositories conference in 2015 held in Indianapolis described thus, One of the many successes of the Hydra community is the fundamental notion from which its name is derived—the concept of many interfaces (“heads”) over top of a single repository (the “body”). The recent release of Fedora 4, with its internal RDF-centric model, has spurred efforts for a community-wide model of collections and works, such that the heads can be sure that the body will behave as they expect it to. That model has been designed and vetted by the Hydra community, and its architecture and initial implementations will be presented in this paper. [Note, and the subject of this proposal has since become known as the 'Portland Common Data Model'.]