Hello J,

It's hard to make broad comparisons between DSpace and Fedora as the
systems are so very different in nature.  And which system you use should
likely be heavily based on your local needs, expertise, and goals.

Fedora is a highly flexible data storage architecture/platform, with native
linked data support.  It natively speaks RDF, and the storage of all
objects within Fedora can be highly customized based on local needs.
However, few institutions use Fedora directly (as it requires a lot of
resources to plan out your local Fedora data model, develop interfaces
against it, etc).  Instead, most institutions that use Fedora actually
choose to use either Samvera (used to be called Hydra) or Islandora, which
are full repository solutions (with their own pre-built data models and
user interfaces).  Samvera provides applications based on Ruby on Rails,
while Islandora is essentially a flavor of Drupal (drupal.org) that is
built on a Fedora backend.
* https://samvera.org/
* https://islandora.ca/

DSpace is an out-of-the-box repository application, with a mind towards
allowing institutions to more quickly manage their digital content and
disseminate it on the web (i.e. optimized for SEO). It has a built in data
model which is similar in nature to Samvera or Islandora, but is *not*
based on Fedora. To make it easier to work with and install, its metadata
is based on Dublin Core. The metadata is customizable, but it is not
hierarchical (like RDF), and instead is limited to the format:
[schema].[element].[qualifier] (you can create as many custom schemas,
elements or qualifiers as you wish however).  DSpace is generally
considered an easier application to install/maintain (than those mentioned
above), which is why it is the most widely used repository application
worldwide (with over 2,000 known institutions using DSpace). DSpace is a
Java web application (with a database backend), and is scalable to support
large numbers of objects. (Fedora is similarly scalable)

As for which is more tailored for a data repository, it also likely depends
heavily on your needs/goals.  As noted, Fedora is more flexible, but that
flexibility requires a lot of management/staff to maintain and support.
DSpace is less flexible in terms of data model or metadata, but is
generally easier to maintain with less staff.  There are some larger scale
data repositories built on both platforms (see below). You could consider
contacting one (or more) of them to talk about their experiences with
either platform.

DSpace-based Data Repositories:

   - DataDryad: https://datadryad.org/  (This system is a custom, open
   source product based on DSpace that is tailored more towards data
   repository needs)
   - Edinburgh Data Share: http://datashare.is.ed.ac.uk
   - University of Minnesota:
   https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/166578


Fedora-based Data Repositories:

   - University of Alberta, Education & Research Archive:
   https://era.library.ualberta.ca/
   - University of Michigan, Deep Blue Data:
   https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/data/
   - ICPSR: https://www.datalumos.org/  and
   https://www.openicpsr.org/openicpsr/


I hope that gives you a decent overview from which to continue your
research.

- Tim


On Wed, Oct 11, 2017 at 5:11 AM J.Dornbusch <[email protected]>
wrote:

> Hello
> I am trying to determine what would be the right research data management
> solution for my institution. There are comparison grids on the internet
> but they are often outdated.
> The data will be in tens of Gos of all types, including office or pdf
> files as well as low and high resolution images, videos, quantitative
> data, shapefiles, XML-TEI...
> We need to add specific metadata standards and controlled vocabularies, to
> assign DOIs, to fine-tune access rights, to interface with other
> applications following semantic web standards. We would like to have
> powerful search capabilities (full text search in data and metadata,
> facetting, stemming...), perhaps on-the-fly OCR processing. Authentication
> would be with Shibboleth but not only. We will use Omeka-S as a front end
> for the general public, knowing that Omeka S already has modules to
> interface with Dspace and Fedora.
> After considering Dataverse, we finally found it too little extensible, 
> although
> we liked some features like the "explore" button that projects an item
> into a third-party data visualization interface.
> We now hesitate between Dspace and Fedora 4 + the new Islandora "Claw". An
> advantage of Dspace is that we would  quickly deploy the turnkey
> interfaces. I have the feeling that Dspace 6 offers a level of
> functionality comparable to that of Fedora, for example regarding
> versioning, scalability...
> Does Dspace have some limitations compared to Fedora ? Is Dspace suitable
> for a large-scale data repository, with lots of custom feature requests and
> integration to other tools ?
>
> I am interested in any advice or resource that would help us in this
> choice.
>
> Regards,
> J.Dornbusch
> https://www.ehess.fr/en
>
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-- 

Tim Donohue
Technical Lead for DSpace & DSpaceDirect
DuraSpace.org | DSpace.org | DSpaceDirect.org

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