Peter Sefton of the AANRO project (and USQ) has raised the question of whether Fez can support dynamic collections and do away with the fixed community / collection model completely.

The AANRO project at USQ is evaluating repositories for use with a project for Land and Water Australia.

In Fez, the communities and collection model is hardwired for the use of the authorisation framework. The model is used so that an authorisation profile can be applied to a large group of objects. This is needed in Fez because our UQ eSpace repository contains some objects which can't be published for copyright reasons so are only available to certain groups at UQ.

One of the problems with the current authorisation system is that rules can be applied on collections or communities or both and it can be confusing as to which rules are being applied. Furthermore, objects can belong to more than one collection. It would be good to see a central place where all of the authorisation settings can be seen.

If Fez were to go down the dynamic collections road, then the dynamic collections would occur on common specific metata items that define the collection. This is already implemented with the browse by author and browse by date links. Dynamic collections would extend these options to include configuring any metadata to be used as the criteria for browsing.

However, without the communities and collections heirarchy, Fez would need a new way to apply the authorisation rules to groups of objects.

My proposal is to achieve this by implementing a central authorisation rules table which would map FezACML rulesets to a set of search criteria. The search criteria defines the set of objects which will have the FezACML rules applied to them.

Using the concept of a rules table would allow Fez to break out of the communities / collections mindset and centralise the authorisation rules making them easier to mange.