eSciDoc: Infrastructure, Services, and Solutions

eSciDoc consists of major parts: a set of services that provide basic and commonly used functionality (the "eSciDoc Infrastructure"), and discipline- or task-specific applications ("eSciDoc Solutions"). Each eSciDoc Solution is built on top of the eSciDoc Infrastructure. Additional services beside of the eSciDoc Infrastructure add higher-level functionality.

• Infrastructure to ensure sustainability

• Services to connect and disseminate data

• Solutions to visualize, publish, manage, and work with data

eSciDoc generalizes concepts, processes, and technology to forster the easy development of new and sustainable solutions.

Services instead of a monolithic application

The eSciDoc Infrastructure is implemented as a set of loosely coupled services, following the design pattern of a "service-oriented architecture". This allows for a very flexible configuration of the infrastructure, in which services may be omitted or replaced with ones that are more adequate. The eSciDoc Infrastructure provides services for object storage, search and indexing, statistics and reporting, persistent identification, workflows, validation, and transformation.

Re-use instead of re-inventing the wheel

Building an e-research platform is an ambitious task. However, many people and organizations are currently working in that field, and by joinig forces, much more can be achieved. Therefore, one of the guiding principles of the eSciDoc project is to re-use existing concepts, services, and implementations as possible. At the same time, the eSciDoc project team intensivly advertizes the outcomes of the project, thus encouraging the re-use of the Infrastructure and the Solution, or just selected services by third parties.

Examples of software that we have integrated into the eSciDoc Infrastructure include

• The repository architecture Fedora Commons for object storage
• SRW/U for searching
• Fedora Generic Search Service for indexing
• JHOVE for technical metadata extraction
• Sun's XACML engine for policy evaluation
• Shibboleth of the Internet2 project for distributed authentication