An integrated metadata access infrastructure for a network of federated curated data repositories

Purpose – This paper aims to study integrated metadata access infrastructure for a network of federated curated data repositories. With the increase in collaborative initiatives among diverse scientific discipline, infrastructure should be in place to facilitate effective information sharing. Scientific data sharing involves provisioning, curation and dissemination of information about the various datasets for discovery and access by other peers, which is achieved using metadata services. The heterogeneous nature of various distributed dataset repositories has resulted in the use of heterogeneous metadata services. This poses some challenges in efficient dataset sharing and information retrieval. To allow for universal accessibility of these autonomous curated data repositories, it is important to establish cross-integration on these data repositories for information sharing. Design/methodology/approach – The authors address this problem through provisioning of a universal metadata interface design that can be integrated with some popular metadata services such as integrated rule-oriented data system (iRODS), OpenDap/THREDDS and MERCURY. Given a network of federated heterogeneous distributed metadata services over autonomous curated data repositories, the authors present an implementation of a universal interface system that can probe and query different metadata databases to access the essential information provided for data discovery and enable data migration. Findings – The authors present the architecture that integrates and allows communication between our interface and the various autonomous data repositories. The authors show how they can integrate their system with THREDDS and iRODS to accomplish data discovery and access operations without altering the implementations of the metadata services at their remote locations. Originality/value – Their system provides unique architecture for information discovery and metadata searches which employs the application programming interfaces for the respective metadata services and communicates using the Zero C Internet communication engine (ICE) protocol.