What is a lightweight repository? - My answer

[Ben O'Steen]

Spent some time trying to put my finger on what I think needs to be
addressed by this group's theme - I have been calling it a
'lightweight repository' without truly specifying what I mean by this.

I think I can explain it now:

In the hierarchy of web-based storage systems, we have (from the most
bare-metal implementations to the most 'cuddly')

* the low-level stores, the ones that provide binary streaming I/O -
Amazon S3 for example
* the remote 'filesystems' - NFS, SAMBA, WebDAV, etc

and then a big gap til you get to

* document management systems
* content management systems (aka IMO repositories ~= CMS limited to a
special structure, with OAIPMH)

What I think is necessary, or at least, what could give lots of very
interesting new possibilities, is a system to fall into that big gap
between bare bones storage and CMS's with somewhat fixed, heavyweight
metadata.

APP/AtomPub does - I think - fall into this gap, but I definitely
think we need more services in there. AtomPub does what it was
designed for very well, but I think there is a need for a slightly
more metadata focussed system.

So lightweight repository (repository in the sense of 'collection of
services'), or web storage with decent metadata capabilities,
metastore, semstore... I haven't worked out a good nomenclature yet ;)

And then, because there is no sense in repeating previous design
mistakes ['silos'], the notion of distributed/distributable items and
the adoption of pragmatic web architecture from the start seems a very
good idea. OAI-ORE seems a pretty decent way to bind together web
resources.

Also note that REST APIs were around long before SOAP et al, and REST
is still the preferred method for access for very many online
services, even if the service offers both (see Amazon's API metrics
10:1 preference at last check). This means that the practical priority
for API development is going to be REST first, then others if
bothered.

Hence RESTORE ;) http://groups.google.com/group/lightweight-repositories/browse_thread/thread/27163980f4cb6c21

Ben