Biodiversity Access
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.
Contents
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.
