Fedora Commons Software Platform/Sun StorageTek(TM) 5800

Ithaca, New York, November 13, 2007 - Fedora Commons , a non-profit organization which provides sustainable technologies to create, manage, publish, share and preserve digital information assets, announced today plans to integrate the Fedora Commons software platform with the Sun StorageTek(TM) 5800 System. This collaboration provides a substantial opportunity to advance open systems for durable access to the digital information assets, which increasingly forms the basis for our intellectual, organizational, scientific and cultural heritage. 

The Fedora Commons free, open-source software platform uses a service-oriented architecture that enables the creation of collaborative, integrated information spaces where any information entity can be linked to any other entity. The StorageTek 5800 system has advanced data integrity, resilience and failure tolerance over other storage system designs, and includes customer-defined arbitrary metadata indexing and search. Customers can seamlessly scale, saving millions of dollars in administrative costs over traditional storage, and be assured of an advanced level of data availability.

During the creation or authoring of intellectual works, changes occur rapidly, but over their lifecycle these works become fixed information assets. New scholarship is built upon earlier works and new science is built upon other research. Without durable access to previous works, research progress cannot be sustained. Unless key digital assets such as datasets and analyses are reliably kept and their authenticity is guaranteed, the scientific method may be compromised and the results may be questioned. The StorageTek 5800 provides a powerful capability to handle fixed unstructured information assets.

The Fedora Commons software platform and StorageTek 5800 architecture form a natural synergy for the creation, management, use and care of fixed information. Both systems recognize that, over time, all technologies and formats change. Dan Davis, Fedora Commons Chief Software Architect, notes, "We must develop an open-ended, evolutionary, interoperable architecture, built upon open standards, to ensure that our digital heritage remains accessible and useful, now and in the future." 

It is hard to imagine all the ways in which our digital information assets will be used and how knowledge will be synthesized in the future. Users and software applications must be free to use, fuse (mash-up), and repurpose information in new and innovative ways. Dan Davis observed, "The StorageTek 5800 extensive and flexible support for metadata closely integrated with the content is a natural enabler for the Fedora Commons semantic linking and dissemination capabilities. Using our offerings together will provide a straightforward, easy way to support the entire information lifecycle from creation to preservation, and to facilitate rapidly building innovative applications or mash-ups while ensuring your information is secure." 

To learn more about Fedora and Sun solutions for digital content, visit <http://www.fedora-commons.org>http://www.fedora-commons.org and <http://sun.com/storagetek/>http://sun.com/storagetek/. For more information contact Carol Minton Morris at (607)255-2702.

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