DRAMA (Digital Repository Authorization Middleware Architecture) is a sub-project within RAMP (http://www.ramp.org.au) that aims to develop a web front-end for Fedora repository, and to re-factor Fedora authentication and authorization into pluggable middleware components. The DRAMA team is happy to announce the initial Alpha Release of our Fedora components. The aim of this release is to demonstrate the following: * Federated authentication (using Shibboleth) for Fedora. * Extended XACML engine support via the introduction of an XML database for storing and querying policies and XACML requests over web services. * Re-factoring of Fedora XACML authorization into an interceptor layer which is separate from Fedora. * A new web GUI for Fedora nicknamed "mura" (Note: that we will be changing the GUI name to a new one soon). Since the software is still in a very early stage, this release is intended to illustrate the various designs and features, and to bed down the framework that we will be using. In upcoming releases, we will focus on stability, performance and documentation. We would appreciate any help from people trying out the software and provide feedbacks to us in making it better. More information is available from our wiki website: http://drama.ramp.org.au Best Regards, -chi -- RAMP Project Manager Macquarie E-Learning Center of Excellence, Macquarie University, Building W6B - Room 148 North Ryde, NSW, 2109, Australia Phone: +61 2 98504140 Fax: +61 2 9850 4148