D4Science Wiki:About
D4Science is the Service Oriented Infrastructure supporting the definition of Virtual Research Environments (VREs). It is equipped with a rich array of "mediators" making it possible the exploitation of services, repositories, and facilities offered by others data and computing infrastructures.
A Service Oriented Infrastructures is an infrastructure developed according to the Service Orientation principles, this reflects in facilities for the re-usability and dynamic allocation of the resources forming the infrastructure itself. A Virtual Research EnvironmentA ''system'' with the following distinguishing features: ''(i)'' it is a Web-based working environment; ''(ii)'' it is tailored to serve the needs of a Community of Practice; ''(iii)'' it is expected to provide a community of practice with the whole array of commodities needed to accomplish the community’s goal(s); ''(iv)'' it is open and flexible with respect to the overall service offering and lifetime; and ''(v)'' it promotes fine-grained controlled sharing of both intermediate and final research results by guaranteeing ownership, provenance, and attribution. is the materialization of a very flexible and agile application development model based on the notion of Software as a Service (SaaS) in which components may be bound instantly, just at the time they are needed and then the binding may be discarded. According to it, user communities are enabled to define their own applications by simply selecting the application constituents (the services, the collections, the machines) among the pool of resources made available through the infrastructure. The cost of operating each defined VREVirtual Research Environment. is completely outsourced to the infrastructure that by applying economies of scale to the operation of the applications (sharing and re-use) can offer better, cheaper and more reliable applications than single communities can themselves.
Please visit the following tailored web sites to discover more about D4ScienceAn e-Infrastructure operated by the D4Science.org initiative..
- D4Science Development Web Site to discover APIs and facilities for the integration of your services into the infrastructure;
- D4Science Support Web Site to request support and infrastructure resources.
