It's about time Fez had a new release but as you probably know from following the mailing lists, we are just really busy supporting the RQF project which is to enable UQ to meet DEST requirements for all Australian Universities.

There is no release date for Fez 1.4 and when we do release it, the changes will all be purely driven by the RQF work. A more community driven release will probably then be on the cards. The most common requests popping up on the mailing lists are for Multilingual support and fulltext searching.

It is also apparant that the interface for mapping XSDs to input forms is far from intuitive. Unfortunately, the problem of allowing an arbitrary mapping from a complex nested tree structure to a flat input form and then back again is just plain difficult so I don't think it will ever be solved using simple wizard like click throughs. The future probably involves a scripting language or an API for writing the mappings as code fragments which are run in a sanitised environment.

What will Fez 1.4 look like?

We are debating whether to release the Fez as 1.4 or as 2.0 because Christiaan has rewritten a huge chunk of code that does the indexing for the repository. Instead of storing our metadata index in one big table of PID / mapping Id / value, he has broken it out into a table for each search key in Fez (a search key groups semantically similar mapping ids together which allows us to search title fields or authors across multiple document types even though they may map to slightly different places in the metadata). The new design results in faster Fez searching and browsing. It is simpler to code with so the queries we write are less buggy. It will also pave the way for postgres support in Fez and the adition of bolt on search engines such as lucene.

As I may have mentioned, I have been working on an interface which allows duplicate objects in Fez to be located, merged and 'retired' using an interactive report object. This tool is essential as we are populating UQ eSpace with data from multiple sources which may have overlap.

The third member of our team, Lachlan, has been busy scripting up bulk ingest processes for a number of data sources to go into UQ eSpace. While these scripts will be of little use to the Fez community (or will they?), a benefit is that Fez is being used at UQ with a much larger set of records and by a larger number of users which has allowed us to find and fix a greater number of bugs. The process for indexing new fedora objects into Fez has been improved: it is speedier, less buggy and easier to use. We also have experience of the many pitfalls of transfering data between systems and can give lots of advice to organisations that have large collections

In a perfect world, I would expect to see a Fez release in late October at the earliest. Now I hear some people expressing shock and disgust but the thing is whenever I make a prediction about a timeline, my first estimate is usually pretty right, then I get pressured to change it to be more in line with what people are wishing for, then we try to do it, the timelines blow out and we end up delivering on my original estimate. So there. (reminder: the latest (ranging fro m slightly to completely untested) Fez code is always available in the Fez subversion repository)