Who is minding the minders of Registry's???

Thanks for the news items on the NCRI work on CORDRA.

It really makes me feel great that my tax $$ are being spent on

such ground breaking work.

The only snags that I now see is that this NCRI team - having done

all this - and suddenly dropped this in our laps - have created a

wave of questions and little answers - so far!

It all seems so strongly reminisent of what happened during the ebXML

original work. Some contractor took all the specifications - then did a

global search and replace on all the acronyms (seriously this did happen)

and then pushed their versions of the spec's to the DoD for funding

to develop it! The excuse was that this was needed immediately -

and that DoD could not wait for the community to evolve it.

Sound familiar? How many times has the DoD ended up with its own

querky varients of what the rest of the world is using? The left hand

and the right hand just seem to not realize they are connected to

Could it be that this NCRI work is also a knock-off? The functionality

all sounds wonderful. Many things we've been asking for and

specifying here in OASIS appear to be implemented already.

Has NIST been involved in the process here at all - or are they

just as blindsided by this too?

And on to the tougher questions - is this available as GFE now or

open source? (We've paid for it - can we now please take delivery?!?)

And of course - if this really does exist as claimed - is it based on

ebXML - and hence how close is it - how easy is it to create

federation between the flavours here? Or wonder, of wonders - even

though the article makes no mention - is the engine underneath their

work actually OMAR? Or one of the other GFE registry systems the

government has already purchased?

I guess we'll begin to piece this all together here. If CORDRA really

is as wonderful as they are claiming - then we seriously have to

figure out how to get all this great technology into peoples hands to

start using it - at a minimum in the GFE space.

OK - I'll crawl back under my rock again now!

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ADL-R: The First Instance of a CORDRA Registry
Henry Jerez, et al., D-Lib Magazine

The Advanced Distributed Learning Registry (ADL-R) is a newly
operational registration system for distributed e-learning content in
the U.S. military. It is the first instance of a registry-based approach
to repository federation resulting from the Content Object Repository
Discovery and Registration/Resolution Architecture (CORDRA) project.
Registry submissions consist of metadata assertions about particular
content objects. These metadata instances are a combination of local
community metadata and global federation or CORDRA level metadata. The
registry must distinguish these metadata layers, therefore the main XML
submission has two main components following two different XML schemas:
(1) The Registry Submission Schema, specifically known in ADL as the
ADL-Reg-T Submission; (2 The Community Metadata Schema, which implements
the LOM approach in ADL-R. Additional characteristics of each metadata
layer are captured by means of business logic modules at both the
Registry/CORDRA level and the Local/Community level. The ADL-R
architecture ensures modularity and scalability by dividing its
operations among several interoperable modules that perform very specific
tasks and present well-defined APIs, and communicate in standard fashion
using XML schema enforced messages. This article provides a brief
overview of CORDRA and detailed information on ADL-R; a related article
in this month's issue of D-Lib Magazine describes FeDCOR, which uses
the same approach to federate DSpace repositories.

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FeDCOR: An Institutional CORDRA Registry
Giridhar Manepalli, et al., D-Lib Magazine

FeDCOR (Federation of DSpace using CORDRA), based on the CORDRA model,
is a registry-based federation system for DSpace instances. DSpace is
a repository system designed to capture, store, index, preserve and
redistribute content in various digital formats. Building a federation
of DSpace repositories using a CORDRA compliant registry serves two
purposes: (1) A federation for DSpace repositories; (2) A CORDRA
registry from the library community. The Registry Engine, through its
main programming component, Registry Lib, is the core library that
coordinates the enforcement of business rules, executes operations,
and defines structural components in FeDCOR. The metadata accessed from
institutional repositories is stored inside digital objects held by the
registry. In ADL-R, the validation module validates the entire
submission to check for XML compliance first, and then for adherence
to the registry and community business rules. In FeDCOR, the community
business rules are enforced by the DSpace repositories, so FeDCOR only
needs to validate the registry business rules and does not use the
community business rules validator. The FeDCOR architecture preserves
most of the original ADL-R components, but adds the first implementation
of an Institutional Repository Registry, and an intelligent population
agent and plug-in that make the registration process automatic. The
result is a useful and relatively seamless CORDRA federation of DSpace
repositories that reuses most of the original ADL-R code and provides
a different community registry with a set of basic CORDRA Services.

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