gCube Information System

Simi L., Lelii L.

Virtual Research Environments  gCube System  Virtual Organisations 

The gCube Information System (shortly, IS) plays a central role in a gCube Infrastructure: it delivers functionalities for publishing, discovering and monitoring the set of resources forming the infrastructure. It acts as the registry of the infrastructure, i.e. all the resources are registered in the IS and every service partaking in the infrastructure must refer to it to dynamically discover the other infrastructure constituents. Moreover, the approach provided by the IS is of great support for the dynamic deployment capabilities of gCube. In this context, a resource can be: - a gCube resource, supporting the deployment and operation of a gCube infrastructure; - an instance state, characterizing the operational state of an instance of a gCube service - a generic resource, any piece of well-formed information Because of its central role, key requirements in terms of quality of service for such a subsystem are performance, scalability, freshness and availability. Moreover, facilities supporting the interaction with such subsystem have been included in the gCore Framework. IS v3.0 released in 2011 features a full implementation of the Web Services Data Access and Integration - The XML Realization (WS-DAIX) Specification, Version 1.0 (http://www.ogf.org/documents/GFD.75.pdf).