D-NET Software Toolkit. Release September 2010.

Manghi P., Mikulicic M., Artini M., Castelli D.

Repositories  Service infrastructures  Data aggregation  Digital Libraries  Parallel Architectures. Distributed architectures 

D-NET is the outcome of research activities inspired by ``GRID resource discovery and sharing'' principles and applied to service oriented architectures and Digital Library system definition and aggregation. In a running D-NET infrastructure data source and service providers can dynamically integrate (register) their resources, embedded as services, at run-time. Such services can in turn discover and interact with others registered to the infrastructure. The environment offers tools for handling autonomic behaviour of resources: special services automatically orchestrate and combine given resources typologies into different workflows, in order to achieve or guarantee an expected behaviour (e.g. replica management, availability of service). In particular, the service kits currently supported by D-NET permit the composition of applications whose services can collect and flexibly aggregate content from a federation of Digital Library systems (multimedia archives and institutional repositories) and supply end-users with portals to access and manipulate such content by means of advanced functionalities; e.g. search, collection management, user registration, query profiling, user communities, and others. Due to its high flexibility and low uptake cost, D-NET is currently serving as software platform for a number of EU projects: DRIVER and DRIVER-II (which first funded its realization), the European Film Gateway, OpenAIRE, HOPE, R2D2. Furthermore, D-NET is under experimentation, for the construction of the respective national repository infrastructures, by the national consortia represented by Chinese Academia of Science (China), Consorcio Madrono (Spain) and National and University Library of Ljubljana (Slovenia).