Extending CMS with Web Services
Chris Wilper
Cornell Digital Library Research Group
This talk will focus on integrating web services with Content Management Systems (CMS) as a means of promoting flexibile content presentation and delivery. More generally, it will show why an architectural distinction between a repository and its content transformation mechanisms can result in a more extensible and preservation-oriented CMS.
Content Management Systems often include built-in mechanisms for transforming content from one form to another. Popular examples include on-the-fly XML stylesheet transformations and Word-to-PDF conversions. It is typical that content created in one format needs to be made available in other formats.
However, building such functionality directly into to the CMS server software inhibits the portability of objects and limits the kinds of operations that can be performed on an object to those provided by the repository software itself. Furthermore, if a transformation mechanism is sufficiently complex, it may limit the life of dependent objects to that of the software delivering them (or at least necessitate a substantial migration effort).
An alternative approach is to architect a CMS so that it can leverage distributed web services, resulting in a clean distinction between the CMS repository and the content transformation mechanisms. I will introduce an architecture called FEDORA that achieves such a distinction, and will use our reference implementation to demonstrate how it solves several specific problems in content management:
- Repository Extensibility
- Object Re-use and Portability
- Object Preservation
Fedora is a digital object and repository architecture that has been in development since 1998. The open-source reference implementation has been under development for about a year, with the first public version slated for release before the OSCOM3 Conference. More information on the architecture and software can be found at the project's website.
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