The GCube Information Organisation Services

The Information Organisation form a subsystem of gCube dedicated to content management, including storage, access, description and annotation.

The architecture of the subsystem has a hourglass topology. Central to the hourglass is the Content Manager (CM), a service that provides uniform access to content served by a variety of back-ends, both inside and outside the system. The Content Manager models content as edge-labelled trees and it relies on plugins to dynamically adapt to an arbitrary number of back-ends.

Back-ends may include storage services as well as access services to content stored further afield. Part of the subsystem is the Storage Manager (SM), a storage service that models content as a web of binary relationships between atomic Information Objects.

The clients of the Content Manager may also be internal or external to gCube. Clients included in the subsystem are the Metadata Manager (MM) and the Annotation Manager (AM), two services that describe and annotate content on behalf of other clients.

All the services in the subsystem align with the design patterns of an abstract architecture, the Open Content Management Architecture.