Using Fedora in the European Project TAS3 to Handle Person-Related Information

Abstract

Person-related information has to be handled in a large variety of contexts. The European Integrated Project “Trusted Architecture for Securely Shared Services (TAS3)” aims to support trusted handling of such information with a system of specially designed web services, using Fedora instances as its standard repositories. In order to deal with the variety of data format specifications in use in the sectors of education, employability and health, TAS3 follows a specification neutral approach, i.e. data are stored in repositories in an internal format. Only for delivery they will be transformed on the fly to satisfy the requirements of the specification in use by the receiving party. This will be realized by accessing data objects through format-specific Fedora disseminators. Within Fedora, complex data will be distributed to simple interrelated data objects, following the Core Components approach of UN/Cefact. This will facilitate the integration of legacy data bases into the framework developed in the project. Specific Fedora data streams will be used as proxies, keeping aggregated XML representations of complex data objects.