High Level Design Documentation

work in progress

Introduction

A DOMS is a Digital Object Management System. This document describes the open source DOMS developed at the State and University Library in Aarhus, Denmark. Program sources for our DOMS are accessible at <TODO: SOURCE FORGE URL>.

The DOMS aims at fulfilling the following objectives.

• Stores and handles digital material and metadata, with a view to long-term preservation
• Supports re-use of components in new collections of material
• Supports a common index with possibility for relations between objects
• Is modular with possibility for additions to the system
• Can be monitored and maintained by non-developers
• Integrates with certain authorization systems

What is not part of the objectives:

• Establishing work flow systems and data-specific ingest systems

Overview of a DOMS system

Our DOMS keeps its data in two different kinds of storage:

1. A Fedora repository
2. A bitstorage

The Fedora repository keeps metadata, and the bitstorage keeps the actual digital material files. If, for example, we were to store audio CDs in a DOMS, the actual digitized tracks, along with scanned cover art, could be stored as files in the bitstorage. The Fedora then would keep an object (or a cluster of objects) representing the CD, and containing information about for example artist(s), production year and record label, as well as information relating this CD to the digitized material in the bitstorage.

System structure

Our system is available as several different packages, each containing part of the DOMS, and each part interacting with the others.

The packages that form the DOMS are the following.

• Fedora ECM (Extended Content Models)
• Interface to bitstorage
• Interface to search engine
• OAI-PMH handling
• The DOMS GUI

In addition, the following separate projects are needed:

• Fedora repository (available at: <TODO: INSERT URL>)

Finally, you may need:

• A bitstorage that the system will use
• A search engine that the system will interface to

The figure below illustrates how the different modules make use of each other.

<TODO: INSERT FIGURE>

DOMS objects

The metadata stored by the DOMS is represented as objects inside a Fedora repository. Each object in the repository may contain the following:

• <TODO: ADD MORE INFO>

• <TODO: ADD MORE INFO>

• <TODO: ADD MORE INFO>

• Relations to other objects (optional)

<TODO: ADD MORE INFO?>

In addition to the objects that contain metadata, i.e. which represent the content of the DOMS, there is a number of special objects which a DOMS always contains. The kinds of predefined objects in this base collection are:

• Content model objects, each acting as a type or class for other objects

• Basic collection objects, all objects belong to a collection

• License objects, every content model relates to a license

<TODO: ADD MORE INFO>

Datamodels

<TODO: ADD MORE INFO>

Usage of a Fedora repository

<TODO: ADD MORE INFO>

Usage of the Fedora ECM

<TODO: ADD MORE INFO>

Validation

<TODO: ADD MORE INFO>

Interfacing with a bitstorage

<TODO: ADD MORE INFO>

Handling OAI-PMH requests

<TODO: ADD MORE INFO>

Interfacing to search engines

<TODO: ADD MORE INFO>

Usage of the DOMS GUI

<TODO: ADD MORE INFO>

The included testbed

<TODO: ADD MORE INFO>