Overview

The D-Net Software Kit is an Open Source service-oriented solution for the construction of customized Data Infrastructures. Data Infrastructures address the need increasingly manifested by research communities to operate over the integration of content collected from several information sources (such as institutional repositories endowed with OAI-PMH interfaces, or archives of research data). Typically, such infrastructures provide applications for:

  1. Managing a federation of input data sources (e.g., OAI-PMH, JDBC, FTP): data source registration, followed by data validation and collection;
  2. Aggregating of data to form uniform Information Spaces: data conversion (mapping, transformation, cleaning, etc.), curation, and enrichment
  3. Prividing Information Space content to end-user or third-party consuming systems: web user interfaces for data discovery (search, browse, recommendations, user prifiling, user collections) and standard APIs to access the data (e.g., OAI-PMH, OAI-ORE, SRW/CQL)

D-NET provides a service-oriented framework where data infrastructures can be constructed in a LEGO-like approach, by selecting and properly combining into data processing workflows the D-NET services required. The resulting infrastructures are:

  • customizable, e.g., formats to be generated by transformation can be configured to match community preferences;
  • extensible, e.g. new services can be integrated, to offer functionality not yet supported by D-NET services;
  • scalable, e.g., index replicas can be maintained to tackle multiple concurrent accesses.

As such, as proven by the several installations, D-NET represents an optiimal low-cost and sustainable solution for the realization of data infrastructures.

 

D-NET is co-funded by the following European Commission projects:


DRIVER (FP6-STREP, grant agreement: IST-034047)

DRIVER-II (FP7-CCCSA, grant agreement: 212147)

EFG (FP7-eContentplus, grant agreement: ECP 517006-EFG)

HOPE (FP7-eContentplus, grant agreement: 250549)

OpenAIRE (FP7-CCCSA grant agreement: 246686)

OpenAIREplus (FP7-CCPCSA, grant agreement: 283595)

EFG1914(FP7-PSP, grant agreement: 292276)