Islandora Sync: Enabling Administrators and Developers

Presentation at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014

Fedora Interest Group Presentations

24x7 Presentations

The Islandora ecosystem of software is largely built as modular Drupal application code. Despite being built within this well-known content management system, a large portion of the many open source Drupal contributed modules have not been compatible with Islandora. This means that desired functionality and user experience patterns have been separately developed where possible in Islandora. Islandora Sync, sponsored by UCLA Library, duplicates content between Fedora Commons and the Drupal entity system to enable full compatibility with Drupal contributed modules. With this advancement, the large Drupal developer and site-building community can work with Fedora Commons repositories through Islandora. This approach opens new conceptual ground for research and development of Fedora Commons based repository systems. This session will discuss at a high level, the architectural challenges and solutions for translating between Fedora Commons' XML metadata model and Drupal's relational database architecture It will also highlight the opportunities and immediate advantages for building Rich Internet Applications with Drupal and other content management systems combined with the preservation and scalability of Fedora Commons.