There's a wealth of information stored in online collaborative services like YouTube, Flickr, and Wikipedia, but are these Web 2.0 services built to facilitate sharing their content across their individual boundaries? A group of academicians at Cornell University argue that this new wave of applications should be constructed with interoperability in mind. The result of their research, funded by DARPA and NSF, is Fedora, the Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture. The project was recently awarded a $4.9M grant by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to expand the functionality of its software platform.
As per the proposal document, "the overall outcome for the Fedora Commons proposal is to enable the organizational and technical frameworks necessary for sustainable open source software to support revolutionary change in how scientists, scholars, and educators produce and share their intellectual outputs, and ensure the integrity and longevity of information."