ScholarSphere is a web application that allows the Penn State research community to deposit, share, and manage its scholarly works. It is also, as some of our users and our peers have observed, a repository app that feels much more like Google Docs or GitHub than earlier-generation repository applications. ScholarSphere is built upon the Hydra framework (Fedora Commons, Solr, Blacklight, Ruby on Rails), MySQL, Redis, Resque, FITS, ImageMagick, jQuery, Bootstrap, and FontAwesome. We'll talk about techniques we used to:
- eliminate Fedora-isms in the application
- no objects
- no datastreams
- no namespaces in URLs
- model and expose RDF metadata in ways that users find unobtrusive
- tradeoffs for using RDF instead of XML to serialize metadata