D-NET proposes a service-oriented approach to data infrastructure construction, aiming at reducing the costs of the organizations having to realize and maintain such systems. More specifically, the software gives life to a dynamic running environment, administered by a responsible organization (RO), where an arbitrary number of participating organizations (POs) can run and share their services, reuse services from others, and form their data infrastructure applications. In this context, each application consists of a constellation of interacting services, selected from the Data Management Areas illustrated below. The D-NET framework governs applications by means of the Enabling Services, administered by the RO and available 24/7. Such services keep a map of the services available to the infrastructure, enable discovery in a peer to peer fashion, and orchestrate services into workflows to deliver expected funtionalities. 

The D-NET approach impacts on realiation and maintenance costs by:

• providing general purpose and customizable services, which can be combined in workflows and configured to satisfy the organization community needs;
• limiting development to the service functionalities not yet supported by D-NET service;
• collaboratively sharing services and hardware resources with other organizations;
• autonomicity of D-NET applications, which can be monitored and orchestrated automatically by so-called Manager Services.