Architecture of Services of Integrated System for Information Resources(ISIR RAS)

A.N. Bezdushnii, D.A. Kovalev, V.A. Serebrjakov
Computing Center of Russian Academy of Sciences

This paper describes technological aspects of architecture and implementation of heterogeneous distributed information system - Integrated System for Information Resources (ISIR). It briefly presents several services of the system, including data replication, indexing and distributed search facility.

ISIR is a heterogeneous distributed information system. The background for ISIR development is huge amount of information collected in RAS, which needs structurization and conversion into digital forms. There also exist a big number of standalone information systems that would benefit greatly of integration. Locations of these systems and maintainer organizations are distributed highly across the country, they use different data representations and access methods, different structural design.

The ISIR system consists of several interrelated services, including:

• repository service, which is responsible for data storage, access and manipulations;
• replication service, which is responsible for data and index exchange;
• index service, which is responsible for generation and manipulations with search indexes of different kinds;
• meta-service, which is responsible for storing, accessing and manipulating metadata needed by all of the services.

These services constitute different system configurations to provide required functionality. In each case the configuration and way of usage of these services are determined with consideration of technical equipment of maintainer organization, existing information systems and their abilities, the structure and representation of information being integrated.

By the term “integration” we primarily mean providing the ability to search all of the systems being consolidated, resulting in common answer about location and accessibility of information found. It is also worth noting, that on the first stage of ISIR project, we consider creation and integration of repositories with persistent, professionally selected and maintained resources – organizational information systems, digital libraries etc. Problems of information extraction and enrichment from sources like Web pages are left out of consideration for now.

About Authors

A.N. Bezdushni i- Ph.D., senior research scientist. Ph. (095)135-5471,135-5280. E-mail: besdushn@ccas.ru
D.A. Kovalev - postgraduate student. E-mail: dk@programmer.net
V.A. Serebrjakov - professor, head of the department. Ph. (095)135-5471,135-5280. E-mail: serebr@ccas.ru