A "Content Repository" is that facility that contains the content managed, displayed or just used by a content application such as a CMS.

Content can be of fine-grained or coarse-grained nature, while in the
past the definition of the term "Repository" was relatively loose, in the
future standards such as JSR170 will sharpen what services are
mandated to be exposed by a content repository.

The set of functionality defined for a "content repository" includes:
(a) Ability to deal with Structured & Unstructured Content
(b) Read & Write Capabilities
(c) Large Binary (multimedia) & small finegrained Text + other datatypes
(d) Finegrained and Coarsgrained
(e) Hierarchy operations, parent/child relations
(f) Query mechanisms
(g) Referencial Integrity
(h) Versioning operations
(i) Observation
(j) Transactional capabilities
(k) Locking
(l) Serialization (export/import)
(m) Access Control

A "Content Repository" can use a variety of different data sources for the
storage of the content such as a file system, a Relational Database?, or an Object Oriented database designed for media assets and large
multimedia objects and all the Metadata associated with such objects.