I've worked with some basic Web tools and have experimented with Resource Description Framework and want to build a metadata repository to manage a collection of Web-based and physical resources. Is there a reasonably easy, open source metadata repository software we could try?

Try Repository in a Box, which runs under Linux and Windows versions of Apache Tomcat using MySQL for data storage. It provides a full-featured repository management system that automatically publishes a browser-capable and searchable catalog. Repository in a Box uses the Basic Interoperability Data Model IEEE standard for encoding metadata but does not publish RDF data directly.

The Fedora (not to be confused with Red Hat Fedora) general-purpose repository system developed jointly by Cornell University Information Science and the University of Virginia Library provides open source repository software and related services to serve as the foundation for many types of information management systems.

Fedora includes the McKoi Java database in the distribution, so it can be installed and used without a stand-alone SQL database implementation.

While Fedora is based on Web service protocols and can be used to publish RDF data readable by tools such as the Piggy Bank semantic browser plug-in for Firefox, Repository in a Box is slightly easier to install and can be used right away.