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 relies on plugins to dynamically adapt to an arbitrary number of back-ends. Clients and plugins synchronise on, respectively, producing and consuming content in canonical tree forms defined by convention within the subsystem.

Back-ends may include storage services as well as access services to content stored further afield. A back-end which is part of the subsystem is the Storage Manager (SM), a service that stores content and organises it as a web of binary, directed relationships.

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 handle canonical tree forms for content descriptions and content annotations, respectively, on behalf of internal or external clients further upstream.

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