Catalogue:Services

iMarine inherited its software stack (gCube) from 2 previous EU projects, D4ScienceAn e-Infrastructure operated by the D4Science.org initiative. and D4ScienceAn e-Infrastructure operated by the D4Science.org initiative. II. The software has been further extended during the iMarine project in order to enhance the foundation and build Marine Applications on top of it concentrating the effort in 3 main functionalities areas :

• Core Facilities : dedicated to provide its users with a range of services for the operation and management of the whole infrastructure. They are detailed in this section
• Data Management Facilities  : dedicated to provide its users with a rich array of services for the management of data in the context of the whole infrastructure.
• Data Consumption Facilities  : dedicated to provide its users with a rich array of services for the exploitation of data in the context of the whole infrastructure

Data Consumption Facilities

The Data Consumption facilities can be further categorized in 5 different areas

Data Retrieval

gCube provides Information Retrieval facilities over large heterogeneous environments. Sources of information that use different technologies, data representation and semantics can be integrated and exploited by gCube's Data Retrieval framework. The architecture and mechanisms provided by the framework ensure flexibility, scalability, high performance and availability. The gCube Data Retrieval Framework aims at hiding the complexity of the underlying environment by:

• providing a declarative approach for querying the hosted information
• scaling to the number of hosted information sources
• Integrating dynamically external sources of information

Data Manipulation

gCube provides Data Manipulation Facilities responsible for transforming content and metadata among different formats and specifications. The architecture and mechanisms provided by the framework satisfy the requirements for arbitrary transformation or homogenization of content and metadata. Its features are useful for:

information retrieval
information presentation
processing and exporting

Transformations can be performed offline and on demand on a single object or on a group of objects.