About: Aims | Motivation | Scope | Stakeholders | Team | Contact

FRED aims and objectives

The Federated Repositories for Education (FRED) project aims to support deployment of repository federations in Australian education and training communities. It will document generic service-oriented models and produce software toolkits that support development of repository federations.

Motivation

Education and training communities are increasingly interested in facilitating the discovery, sharing and re-use of learning content by creating interoperable federations of learning content repositories.

Learning and training organisations are increasingly deploying repositories to manage and share learning content within the organisation. The requirement for the federation of learning content repositories is driven by business models for sharing and re-use of learning content across organisations.

Internationally, work on repository federation has focused on CORDRA™ (Content Object Repository Discovery and Registration/Resolution Architecture). CORDRA is a collaboration between ADL, the U.S. Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) and Learning Systems Architecture Lab (LSAL) to develop an open, standards-based reference model for how to design and implement software systems for the purposes of discovery, sharing and reuse of learning content through the establishment of interoperable federations of learning content repositories.

In Australia, a number of projects have approached the Australian ADL Partnership Laboratory for advice on using a CORDRA-like model to progress development of their own repository federations. They include:

• The Learning Object Repository Network (LORN) which is federating learning content repositories in the Vocational Training and Education sector.
• The Learning Federation is distributing content to distributed repositories.
• The Totally Intelligent Logistics Inquiry Service (TILIS) which is federating learning and training content repositories for the Transport and Logistics industry sector.
• The Australian Research Repositories Online to the World (ARROW) project which is federating digital repositories in higher education institutions.
• The Online Research Collections Australia (ORCA) project which is federating information on e-research data collections.
• The Research ActivityFlow and Middleware Priorities (RAMP) project which is investigating open standards authorisation for protected repositories.

Each of these projects will necessarily have different requirements for the federation of their repositories, reflecting their different community (policy), legal, and technical backgrounds. For that reason, the FRED project will develop general outputs that can be adapted to support the individual projects.

Project scope

The FRED project is producing:

1. User scenarios documenting community requirements for repository federations,
2. Service-oriented e-Framework representations of repository federations that support the user scenarios, and
3. Software toolkits to help communities develop services needed to support federations of repositories.

Note: The FRED project outputs are intended to support community development of repository federations. The FRED project is not itself creating repository federations and is not deploying services to support repository federations.

Stakeholders

The FRED project worked to provide repository federation infrastructure for Australian stakeholders in the education and training domains. The following organisations are “Frederators”—stakeholders in the FRED project. They had early access to project outputs and gave input on the direction of the project:

• Learning Object Repository Network (LORN)
• E-Standards for Training
• The Learning Federation
• Totally Intelligent Logistics Inquiry Service (TILIS)
• education.au limited
• HarvestRoad Limited
• Australian Research Repositories Online to the World (ARROW)
• Meta-Access Management System (MAMS)
• Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR)

Team Members

The following people were employed to work part time on the FRED project.

• Nigel Ward, Project Manager, Link Affiliates, Brisbane
• Nick Nicholas, Business Analyst, Link Affiliates, Melbourne
• Oliver Lucido, Lead developer, University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba
• Dan Rehak, Technical adviser, University of Memphis
• David Levy, Business Analyst & Developer, Link Affiliates, Canberra

Contact

For enquiries about the FRED project, please email enquiries @ adlaustralia.org.

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Copyright © University of Southern Queensland.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/au/

This work created as part of the Federated Repositories for Education (FRED) Project within the Australian ADL Partnership Laboratory. The FRED project was funded from October 2006 to June 2007 by the Australian Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) under the Framework for Open Learning Programme and from July 2007 to December 2007 by DEST and the Australian Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research (DIISR) under the Systemic Infrastructure Initiative (SII) as part of the Commonwealth Government's Backing Australia's Ability - An Innovation Action Plan for the Future (BAA).

The University of Southern Queensland (USQ) provides the Australian ADL Partnership Lab with strategic advice, staff, technical support, administrative support and a corporate legal framework.