Biodiversity Access

From Gcube Wiki
Revision as of 17:27, 27 February 2012 by Leonardo.candela (Talk | contribs)

Jump to: navigation, search

This subsystem is part of the Data Access and Storage Facilities. Overall, the subsystem is a cluster of components that allows uniform access over different biodiversity repositories. This document outlines their design rationale, key features, and high-level architecture as well as the options for their deployment.

Overview

The goal of this subsystem is to offer an uniform access over different biodiversity repositories through a simple API. The services have dynamically extensible architectures, i.e. rely on independently developed plugins to adapt their APIs to a variety of back-ends within or outside the system. When connected to remote data sources, the services may be widely replicated and their replicas know how to leverage the Enabling Services to scale horizontally to the capacity of the remote back-ends.

Design

Philosophy

Handling heterogeneous biodiversity repositories with different capabilities and dissimilar results modeling is one of the main goals for biodiversity studies. This subsystem offer the possibility to retrieve, to manage and to elaborate all this data with a single entry point. The choice to not use the tree-manager subsystem was taken as the APIs are too general to use them in this specific context. In this case a domain specific APIs is needed.

Architecture

Biodiversity access is provided by the following components:

  • species-manager-service: a stateless Web Service that exposes read operations and implements it by delegation to dynamically deployable plugins for target repository sources within and outside the system;
  • species-manager-library: a client library that implements a high-level facade to the remote APIs of the Species manager service;
  • obis-species-plugin: a plugin of the Species Manager service that interacts with [http:// OBIS] data source;
  • gbif-species-plugin: a plugin of the Species Manager service that interacts with [http:// GBIF] data source;
  • catalogueoflife-species-plugin: a plugin of the Species Manager service that interacts with [http:// Catalogue of Life] data source;
  • flora-species-plugin: a plugin of the Species Manager service that interacts with [http:// Brazilian Flora] data source.