Saturday, May 16, 2009

Fedora Commons and DSpace Foundation Join Together to Create DuraSpace Organization


Fedora Commons and the DSpace Foundation, two of the largest providers of open source software for managing and providing access to digital content, have announced today that they will join their organizations to pursue a common mission. Jointly, they will provide leadership and innovation in open source technologies for global communities who manage, preserve, and provide access to digital content.
The joined organization, named "DuraSpace," will sustain and grow its flagship repository platforms - Fedora and DSpace. DuraSpace will also expand its portfolio by offering new technologies and services that respond to the dynamic environment of the Web and to new requirements from existing and future users. DuraSpace will focus on supporting existing communities and will also engage a larger and more diverse group of stakeholders in support of its not-for-profit mission. The organization will be led by an executive team consisting of Sandy Payette (Chief Executive Officer), Michele Kimpton (Chief Business Officer), and Brad McLean (Chief Technology Officer) and will operate out of offices in Ithaca, NY and Cambridge, MA.
"This is a great development," said Clifford Lynch, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI). "It will focus resources and talent in a way that should really accelerate progress in areas critical to the research, education, and cultural memory communities. The new emphasis on distributed reliable storage infrastructure services and their integration with repositories is particularly timely."


Together Fedora and DSpace make up the largest market share of open repositories worldwide, serving over 700 institutions. These include organizations committed to the use of open source software solutions for the dissemination and preservation of academic, scientific, and cultural digital content.
"The joining of DSpace and Fedora Commons is a watershed event for libraries, specifically, and higher education, more generally," said James Hilton, CIO of the University of Virginia. "Separately, these two organizations operated with similar missions and a shared commitment to developing and supporting open technologies. By bringing together the technical, financial, and community-based resources of the two organizations, their communities gain a robust organization focused on solving the many challenges involved in storing, curating, and preserving digital data and scholarship," he said.


New Products
DuraSpace will continue to support its existing software platforms, DSpace and Fedora, as well as expand its offerings to support the needs of global information communities. The first new technology to emerge will be a Web-based service named "DuraCloud." DuraCloud is a hosted service that takes advantage of the cost efficiencies of cloud storage and cloud computing, while adding value to help ensure longevity and re-use of digital content. The DuraSpace organization is developing partnerships with commercial cloud providers who offer both storage and computing capabilities.
The DuraCloud service will be run by the DuraSpace organization. Its target audiences are organizations responsible for digital preservation and groups creating shared spaces for access and re-use of digital content. DuraCloud will be accessible directly as a Web service and also via plug-ins to digital repositories including Fedora and DSpace. The software developed to support the DuraCloud service will be made available as open source. An early release of DuraCloud will be available for selected pilot partners in Fall 2009.


Key Benefits of the DuraSpace Organization
DuraSpace will support both DSpace and Fedora by working closely with both communities and when possible, develop synergistic technologies, services, and programs that increase interoperability of the two platforms. DuraSpace will also support other open source software projects including the Mulgara semantic store, a scalable RDF database.
DuraSpace is mission-focused. The organization will be associated with its broader mission of working towards developing services and solutions on behalf of diverse communities rather than focusing on single-solution product development. This change in orientation can be characterized as moving beyond the software and toward the mission.
DuraSpace will bring strength and leadership to a larger community and amplify the value brought by each organization individually. With both organizations working in unison, there can be significant economies of scale, synergies in developing open technologies and services, and a strong position for long-term sustainability.
Learn More about DuraSpace
DuraSpace will be represented at the Fourth Annual International Conference on Open Repositories (http://openrepositories.org/). Please check the schedule and visit the Fedora Commons and DSpace information tables at the conference to learn more. Also, initial information will be available at the DuraSpace website, with more information forthcoming in June 2009.


About Fedora Commons
Fedora Commons (http://fedora-commons.org/) was established in 2007 as a not-for-profit organization and the home of the Fedora repository software and related open source projects. Fedora is a robust, integrated, repository system that enables storage, access and management for virtually any kind of digital content. The Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture (Fedora) was originally designed by Sandy Payette and colleagues at Cornell University and was established as an open source project in 2001 by Cornell and the University of Virginia. Fedora has a large international user community and is installed worldwide at universities, libraries, research institutions, cultural organizations, and corporations.


About DSpace Foundation
The DSpace Foundation (http://dspace.org/) was formed in 2007 to support the growing global community of institutions using DSpace open source software to manage scholarly works in a digital repository. DSpace was jointly developed in 2002 by Hewlett-Packard and the MIT Libraries. Today, there are over more than 500 organizations worldwide using the software to manage, preserve, and share their scholarly output.

Google Squared

Google Squared
May12, 2009 was the historical moment in Google history, when at searchology event, launched a new searching tool named Google Squared. This is the best effort in web 3.0 and semantic searcrh. It is the effort of structuring the unstructred data on web pages and in process they extract data from the web pages and presents the search results as squares in an online spreadsheet format.The San Francisco Chronicle described the feature in a bit more detail that it compiles details from several Web pages and organizes them into a table on a single page, with multiple columns like a spread sheet. One of the features announced today is called Search Options, which is a collection of tools designed to let users better "slice and dice" their search results so they can manipulate the information they're getting. Mayer said the tools should help people who struggle with what exactly what query they should pose."

Let's say you are looking for forum discussions about a specific product, but are most interested in ones that have taken place more recently," she wrote. "That's not an easy query to formulate, but with Search Options you can search for the product's name, apply the option to filter out anything but forum sites, and then apply an option to only see results from the past week."One Search Options tool is geared toward giving users more information when they do a search. For instance, instead of just getting results in text form, they could have the search engine return images as well.Google acknowledged that this was still very much a “labs” feature that was imperfect at best. However, between Wolfram Alpha, Google’s efforts in semantic search, and a host of competitors that will be popping up in this field, we may very well be on the edge of Search 3.0. This is good news for our students, teachers, and library scientists struggling to help our students get the information they want from the billions of pages of junk (and millions of pages of interest) floating around the web. In that same layer Google also is adding more information to its results snippets -- those little pieces of text that tell you about the site that's been pulled up. If you're searching for a hotel, for example, the snippet won't just tell you the name of the hotel and where it is -- now it could tell you its price range, number of stars in customer reviews and the number of reviews listed. Google Squared still needs a lot of improvement, which is why it's being released to Labs. It collects the information by looking for structures that seem to imply facts. The squares are built out based on high probability of facts. There will be concerns over Google providing this data on its own by grabbing data and serving it up without sending searchers to the sites that provided the info.
For more reading following links may be helpful ------
Screenshots of Google Squared
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2009-05-12-n39.html
YouTube-Google Squared
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2onuEXThPs

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