lakesuperior_legacy

LAKEsuperior

LAKEsuperior is an experimental Fedora Repository implementation.

Basic concepts

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

Key features:

• Drop-in replacement for Fedora4 (with some caveats: see Delta document)—currently being tested with Hyrax 2
• Stores metadata in a graph store, binaries in filesystem
• Simple search and SPARQL Query API via back-end triplestore (alpha 2)
• No performance issues storing many resources under the same container; no kudzu pairtree segmentation ¹
• Mitigates "many member" issue: constant performance writing to a resource with many children or members; option to omit children in retrieval
• Flexible back-end layouts: options to organize information in back end
• Migration tool (in alpha3)

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.

Alpha 1 application code consists of less than 2200 lines and strives to maintain a linear, intuitive code structure to foster collaboration. TODO link to tech overview and approach

Installation

Dependencies

1. A triplestore. Fuseki is the benchmark used so far in development. Other implementations are possible as long as they support RDF 1.1 and SPARQL over HTTP
2. A message broker supporting the STOMP protocol. If you have a separate instance of official Fedora listening to port 61613, that will do the job
3. Python 3.5 or greater

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. Initialize 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> (alternatively you can add this line to your virtualenv activate script)
9. Configure the application
10. Start your triplestore and STOMP broker
11. Run util/bootstrap.py to initialize the binary and graph stores
12. Run ./fcrepo for a multi-threaded server or flask run for a single-threaded development server

Production deployment

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

Status and development

LAKEsuperior is in alpha status. Please see the TODO list for a rudimentary road map and status.

Further documentation

The design documents are in the doc/pdf folder. @TODO needs update

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