Metadata and Buckets in the Smart Object, Dumb Archive (SODA) Model
Michael L. Nelson, Kurt J. Maly, D. R. Croom, Steven W. Robbins · ODU Digital Commons (Old Dominion University) · 2004
We present the Smart Object, Dumb Archive (SODA) model for digital libraries (DLs), and discuss the role of metadata in SODA. The premise of the SODA model is to "push down" many of the functionalities generally associated with archives into the data objects themselves. Thus the data objects become "smarter", and the archives "dumber". In the SODA model, archives become primarily set managers, and the objects themselves negotiate and handle presentation, enforce terms and conditions, and perform data content management. Buckets are our implementation of smart objects, and da is our reference implementation for dumb archives. We also present our approach to metadata translation for buckets. 1.0 INTRODUCTION The observation that motivated the Smart Object, Dumb Archive (SODA) model for digital libraries (DLs) is that data objects are more important than the archives that hold them. Many DL systems and protocols are reaching a level of complexity where DL-interoperability and object mob...