The Fascinator is a software platform for eResearch. Development started in 2008 in an attempt to create a clean and functional Institutional Repository user interface. We succeeded in creating a faceted search interface for repositories such as ePrints and Fedora Commons.

Two editions are now available – both based in the same software. The main difference between them is their application and how data is managed:

Desktop Edition

An experimental software package based on The Fascinator and inspired by the ongoing problem of getting eResearch data and publications into repositories where they can be backed up, preserved and shared with a network of other researchers. See Desktop eResearch revolution which gives some of the background.

Institutional Repository Edition

The goal of the IR edition is to create a simple interface to Fedora that uses a single technology – Solr – to handle all browsing, searching and security. This contrasts with solutions that use RDF for browsing by ‘collection’, XACML for security, a text indexer for fulltext search, and in some cases relational database tables. By removing some of these layers it makes for a fast application which is easy to configure.

The Fascinator is Open Source (GPL) with copyright held by the University of Southern Queensland.