Information System

The gCube Information System (IS) has been designed to support Research Infrastructure federation.

Definition

The term ‘research infrastructures’ refers to facilities, resources and related services used by the scientific community to conduct top-level research in their respective fields, ranging from social sciences to astronomy, genomics to nanotechnologies https://ec.europa.eu/research/infrastructures/index_en.cfm?pg=about

IS: a registry of the infrastructure offering global and partial view of

• its resources (e.g. computing, storage, services, software, datasets);
• their current status (e.g. up and running, available);
• their relationships with other resources;
• the policies governing their exploitation.

Requirements

Functional Requirements

• Data Definition Language (DDL) for schemas definition (entities and relations);
• Entity and Relation instances must be:
  • Univocally identifiable;
  • Selective/Partial updatable;
  • Validated against the Schema.
• Referential Integrity;
• Dynamic Query (no pre-define query);
• Standard Abstraction (desiderata);
• Subscription Notification Support.

Non-Functional Requirements

• High Availability (HA);
• Eventual Consistency;
• Horizontal Scalability;
• Multi-Tenancy, i.e. a single instance of the technology should be able to serve many “independent” contexts (between the same Application Domain) ;
• EUPL licence compatibility of all its components.

Architecture

The constituent components are:

• Facet Based Resource Model
  • IS Model
  • gCube Model
• Information System Resource Registry
  • Resource Registry
  • Resource Registry Client
  • Resource Registry Publisher
• Backend Database (i.e. OrientDB as Graph Database)
• Information System Subscription Notification Service