lakesuperior_legacy

LAKEsuperior

LAKEsuperior is an experimental Fedora Repository implementation.

Guiding Principles

LAKEsuperior aims at being an uncomplicated, efficient Fedora 4 implementation.

Its main goals are:

• Reliability: Based on solid technologies with stability in mind.
• Efficiency: Small memory and CPU footprint, high scalability.
• Ease of management: Tools to perform monitoring and maintenance included.
• Simplicity of design: Straight-forward architecture, robustness over features.

Key features

• Drop-in replacement for Fedora4 (with some caveats); currently being tested with Hyrax 2
• Very stable persistence layer based on LMDB and filesystem. Fully ACID-compliant writes guarantee consistency of data.
• Term-based search (planned) and SPARQL Query API + UI
• No performance penalty for storing many resources under the same container; no kudzu pairtree segmentation ¹
• Extensible provenance metadata tracking
• Multi-modal access: HTTP (REST), command line interface and native Python API.
• Fits in a pocket: you can carry 50M triples in an 8Gb memory stick.

Implementation of the official Fedora API specs (Fedora 5.x and beyond) is not foreseen in the short term, however it would be a natural evolution of this project if it gains support.

Please make sure you read the Delta document for divergences with the official Fedora4 implementation.

Target Audience

LAKEsuperior is for anybody who cares about preserving data in the long term.

Less vaguely, LAKEsuperior is targeted at who needs to store large quantities of highly linked metadata and documents.

Its Python/C environment and API make it particularly well suited for academic and scientific environments who would be able to embed it in a Python application as a library or extend it via plug-ins.

LAKEsuperior is able to be exposed to the Web as a Linked Data Platform server. It also acts as a SPARQL query (read-only) endpoint, however it is not meant to be used as a full-fledged triplestore at the moment.

In its current status, LAKEsuperior is aimed at developers and hands-on managers who are able to run a Python environment and are interested in evaluating this project.

Installation

Dependencies

1. Python 3.5 or greater.
2. The LMDB database library. It should be included in most Linux distributions' standard package repositories.
3. A message broker supporting the STOMP protocol. For testing and evaluation purposes, Coilmq is included with the dependencies and should be automatically installed.

Installation steps

1. Install dependencies as indicated above
2. Create a virtualenv in a project folder: virtualenv -p <python 3.5+ exec path> <virtualenv folder>
3. Activate the virtualenv: source <path_to_virtualenv>/bin/activate
4. Clone this repo
5. cd into repo folder
6. Install dependencies: pip install -r requirements.txt
7. Copy the etc.skeleton folder to a separate location
8. Set the configuration folder location in the environment: export FCREPO_CONFIG_DIR=<your config dir location> (you can add this line at the end of your virtualenv activate script)
9. Configure the application
10. Start your STOMP broker, e.g.: coilmq &
11. Run ./lsup_admin bootstrap to initialize the binary and graph stores
12. Run ./fcrepo.

Production deployment

If you like fried repositories for lunch, deploy before 11AM.

Status and development

LAKEsuperior is in alpha status. Please see the project issues list for a rudimentary road map.

Technical documentation

Architecture Overview

Content Model

Command-Line Reference

Storage Implementation

Performance Benchmarks

---

1 However if your client splits pairtrees upstream, such as Hyrax does, that obviously needs to change to get rid of the path segments. ↩