Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. New Features and Enhancements
  3. Bug Fixes
  4. Known Issues
  5. Installation
  6. Historic Release Notes (prior releases)

  1. Introduction

    Fedora 3.0 is a major release of Fedora that introduces the Content Model Architecture among several other significant features, listed below. Several bugs have also been addressed with this release.

  2. New Features and Enhancements

    The following features and enhancements have been included in this release.
    1. Introduction of the Content Model Architecture The Content Model Architecture, or CMA, has added a new system-recognized Fedora Object type, the Content Model Object. Among the improvements this architectural change provides is that operations or behaviors are now attached to objects at the content model level. The traditional "disseminator" has been replaced by the CMA functionality.

      Data objects assert their membership to a content model by adding a "fedora-model:hasModel" statement to the RELS-EXT datastream. This replaces the old system object property "fedora-model:contentModel". The demo objects have been updated to reflect this new way of asserting type (and optionally, attaching behaviors).

      See the Content Model Architecture document for more extensive information on the purpose and design of the CMA.
    2. Fedora REST API (experimental) The new REST API exposes a subset of the Access and Management interfaces as a RESTful (Representational State Transfer) Web Service. This is an experimental interface which should be expected to change in future versions of the Fedora Repository. It is a less secure interface than the other Fedora APIs and should be used with care. This interface provides a design which may be used to replace functions of API-A LITE and support many API-M functions. Fedora Commons would like to thank MediaShelf for contributing this feature.
    3. Mulgara Support The Resource Index has been updated to support Mulgara 2.0 as its default triplestore. MPTStore is supported as an alternative.
    4. Migration Utilities The 3.0 migration utilities provide an upgrade path from prior versions of Fedora. The utilities support converting old Disseminators to use the CMA and upgrading objects to FOXML 1.1. For more information on these utilities, see the Fedora Migration Guide.
    5. Relational Index Simplification With the CMA, the most complex of Fedora's database tables are no longer necessary. This reduces the complexity of the code while also reducing the amount of time Fedora needs to add, change, and remove information in the database. It also significantly reduces the storage space requirements for the database and is designed to significantly increase performance and scalability.
    6. Dynamic Behaviors Objects may now be added or removed from the system dynamically due to the transition to allowing system checks to produce runtime errors. With previous releases of Fedora, Behavior Definitions had to be ingested first, followed by Behavior Mechanisms, followed by Data Objects. Now, Fedora allows the ingest (and purge) of objects in any order, regardless of type. In addition, system-recognized Datastreams for the new Service Definition and Service Deployment objects can now be edited in-place.
    7. Error Reporting Improvements Fedora now sends correct HTTP status codes and more user-friendly messages when API-A-LITE, API-M-LITE, and search-related errors occur. With the introduction of the CMA, these error messages also provide better detail on the reason a request failed (missing object, Datastream, etc.).
    8. Multiple Owners Per Digital Object By specifying a comma-separated list, you can now specify multiple owners as the "ownerId" of Fedora Objects. The list of owners can be provided as input to your XACML policies to support more flexible policy enforcement. See the example policies for more information.
    9. Journaling The following improvements enable more sophisticated high availability configurations with Fedora. See the Journaling Guide for more information on configuring and using these features.
      1. RMI Support - Journal leaders/followers can now be configured to communicate via RMI.
      2. Multicast Support - Journaling now supports multiple followers via disk, RMI, or combination.
      3. Read-only Mode - Formerly, when configured as a follower, a Fedora repository would give an error for any API-M call. Now, a follower will allow calls to API-M methods that do not make changes to the repository.
    10. Java 6 Compatibility Prior versions of Fedora would run with Java 1.5 or 1.6, but compiling was restricted to JDK 1.5. Now Fedora can be compiled with JDK 1.6 as well.
    11. Relationships API The Fedora Management interface has been extended to support the per-object assertion and retrieval of user-defined relationships in the RELS-EXT Datastream. The new relationships API methods are addRelationship, getRelationships, and purgeRelationship. The Resource Index does not need to be enabled in order to use these methods.
    12. Fedora Object XML Schemas Revised With the introduction of the CMA, the FOXML and Fedora METS Extension schemas have been versioned to 1.1. This was primarily a simplification to remove disseminator-related elements. For a complete list of changes, see the changelog in the associated schema documents:
    13. Atom and Atom Zip Support Fedora objects can now be imported and exported in a special profile of the Atom syndication format. In addition, Fedora now supports the import and export of Zip files containing an Atom manifest and a set of Datastreams, included in the Zip as regular files. For examples of these new formats, see the demo/atom and demo/atom-zip directories in the client.
    14. Messaging Support Fedora can now be configured to produce JMS messages for API-M events. Message selectors are also supported. The JMS interface has been tested using the Apache ActiveMQ JMS provider though any JMS provider may be used. See the Fedora Messaging Guide for more information.
    15. Saxon 8 & XSLT2 Support The Saxon library in Fedora has been upgraded to version 8. so the bundled Saxon service can now make use of more advanced stylesheets.
    16. Bundled Tomcat Updated to 5.5.26 When choosing to use the bundled Tomcat for deployment, the Fedora installer now uses version 5.5.26. This was formerly version 5.0.28.
    17. MIME Type and FORMAT_URI Updates Fedora's system-recognized Datastreams (DC, RELS-EXT, etc) have been updated with consistent MIME types and FORMAT_URI values. Notably, RELS-EXT has been updated to use MIME type "application/rdf+xml", and all system-recognized Datastreams have been updated to use FORMAT_URIs. For a complete list, install Fedora 3.0 and see the DS-COMPOSITE-MODEL Datastream of each of the system content models. These objects don't need to be ingested; they are automatically present in every Fedora 3.0 repository.
    18. Admin GUI Using Templates for CMA Objects The out-of-date "Builders" menu in the admin client has been replaced with a simple templating approach when creating new Content Model objects, Service Definition objects, or Service Deployment objects. When creating these special objects, the Admin GUI now pre-populates them with the basic required Datastreams, which the user can then fill out using the object editor interface.
    19. Basic Content Model-Based Validation This feature provides system operators a way to validate the integrity of part or all of their repository, based on content models. For more information about this feature, see the documentation for the fedora-validate-objects command-line utility.
    20. RELS-EXT Validation Relaxed RELS-EXT Datastreams are now allowed to make self-referential relationships. This relaxation was made to support the "basic" system-defined content model, fedora-system:FedoraObject-3.0 which has itself as a content model.
    21. Batch Modify Utility MIME Restriction Relaxed Former versions of the batch modify utility required that Inline XML Datastreams had the "text/xml" MIME type. This restriction was dropped in order to support other xml-based MIME types, such as "application/rdf+xml".
    22. Basic Performance Test Suite In order to support basic performance testing with various environments and configurations, a suite of tests has been included as part of the distribution. These tests can be executed from the source distribution by running "ant performance-tests".

  3. Bug Fixes

    The following bugs have been addressed for this release.

  4. Known Issues

    The following outstanding issues are present with this release: Please see the Fedora Commons Bug Tracker for an up-to-date list of outstanding bugs.

  5. Installation

    For instructions on installing and upgrading Fedora, please consult the Installation Guide and the Fedora Upgrade and Migration Guide.

  6. Historic Release Notes

    Release notes for previous versions of Fedora:
    [2.2.2], [2.2.1], [2.2], [2.1.1], [2.1], [2.1b], [2.0], [1.2.1], [1.2], [1.1.1], [1.1], [1.0], [0.9], [Beta 2], [Alpha 1]