The Fascinator is a versatile software platform that offers your project a solid base for handling digital information.Central to The Fascinator's architecture is a process consisting of:

1. Harvesting digital information (data) from a range of sources including: files, syndication feeds and web form input
2. Transformation of data for extracting metadata, creating web-friendly renditions and generating new outputs
3. Storage of the data and its various transformations
4. Indexing of the data into an Apache Solrindex that provides faceted searching

A range of features have been developed over these central features, including:

1. Security that ensures data is protected yet keeps searching and interfaces fast.
2. User interface tools for packaging data together and distributing it to a variety of services using standards such as OAI-PMH and Atom
3. Annotation tools for annotating text, images and video
4. Basic workflow to manage data submission
5. Event logging that allows other systems keep track of what's happening

The Fascinator features plug-in support that allows you to select from existing features or develop your own harvesters, transformers and storage layers. The user interface is very flexible and can be customised to best suit user needs. By providing a solid platform The Fascinator improves your development time and, with plugin and customisation options, can be tailored to project needs.