Hydra philosophy & value proposition

Owned by Bill Branan
Jun 16, 2017

Hydra Philosophy

One Body, Many Heads

One Repository & One Framework supporting many users interacting with diverse content in diverse ways.

One Hydra Framework ... Many Hydra Heads ... Many Content Types

Specialized heads to address particular users interacting with particular content

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

Multiple institutions collaborating.
Governance model

Succeffully Encouraging contributing back to core (coordinating plans, distributed development, well designed means for contributing code)

Making a solution that works for us

If it works for us (as a group) and is developed well, it will lend itself to re-use elsewhere

Agile, Distributed Development along a broad, inter-institutional path

Apply best practices in development

Sustainability / Longevity: Eyes on the Horizon, Feet on the Ground

  • multi-institution
  • designed to allow software & content to evolve
  • not grant-funded -- "No grants were harmed in the making of this software"

Value Proposition

One Body, Many Heads

Audiences:

Big Institutions with sizeable dev teams
Small & Mid-Size Institutions

Community

Meritocracy – Pick it up, run with it, share it.
Strong Developer Community
Best Practices
Collaborative Community
Strong model for collaborative, distributed development ... plugins, etc.

Relationship to Fedora -- Steering Group includes:

  • 2 DuraSpace Gold Sponsors
  • 1 DuraSpace Registered Service Provider
  • 1 Rep from DuraSpace
  • 1 Fedora Committer

Diversity

Diverse users, Diverse Content, Diverse Tasks

Avenues for Development

Framework vs one Application

Features

Preservation

Fedora

Content Re-use

Deposit, Description, Discovery & Delivery

Access Controls

  • Gated Discovery

Rich Interaction

Solr-driven Faceted Search & Discovery (Blacklight)
JQuery features, etc.

Collections Management

Componentized

re-purpose any component in the stack
easy to re-use the components that work while replacing the ones that don't work

Thoroughly Tested

automated tests & user testing at every layer

Designed for Collaboration

development model facilitates collaboration

Metadata Agnostic

Opinionated Metadata (OM) allows you to consume, create, edit and index any XML metadata, regardless of the schema
Hydra's view helpers allow you to construct edit interfaces that operate on any of that XML metadata