Software is transient: it’s the data that matter. Anyone who works with software understands that applications come and go, and even those that last many years go through numerous upgrades and re-architectures as they try to keep up with the latest technological advances. This flux creates a problem: how do we efficiently move our data through changing software and version upgrades as losslessly as possible? The Fedora community recently confronted this problem, which led to the development of a tool that could have broad utility for data migrations. Fedora is a flexible, extensible, open source repository platform for managing, preserving, and providing access to digital content. Fedora has gone through several major version upgrades since its initial conception almost 20 years ago, most recently with the move to Fedora 4. Fedora 4 is a complete software re-architecture, which necessitates a data migration from previous versions of Fedora. This experience led the Fedora community to focus on making it as easy as possible to get data into and out of Fedora in standard formats, an effort that culminated in the creation of an import/export utility that standardizes on RDF and the BagIt specification to transfer data between versions of Fedora as well as external preservation systems. This effort coincides with a recently chartered Research Data Alliance working group with a mandate to explore technologies and standards for interoperability between repository platforms and make recommendations on this topic. The group is exploring the Fedora import/export utility as a possible basis for broader interoperability between diverse repository platforms by building on this standard import/export functionality. This paper will provide an overview of the import/export efforts that have taken place so far, and discuss how we might achieve broader interoperability and ease data migrations through the work of the RDA Research Data Repository Interoperability working group.

iPRES, Kyoto

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