Introduction
The ARDC Research Data Australia (RDA) Registry Software package is an open source solution designed to harvest, store, manage, search and view metadata with ease. The software is designed, developed and managed by the ARDC Development team.
The RDA Registry Software package has primarily been developed to harvest, manage and display metadata about research data collections and the activities, parties and services which relate to them. The ARDC implementation of the software allows researchers and research organisations to publish the existence of research data into a metadata registry and allow prospective users of that data to discover it via a discovery portal (i.e. Research Data Australia).
The software package includes a number of core components which are briefly described below.
RDA Registry
The RDA Registry is used to store, create and manage metadata records. The registry is modelled on an international standard, ISO 2146:2010 Information and documentation -- Registry services for libraries and related organisations. This standard was carefully chosen in preference to other models as it has strong support for a federated registry service that contains descriptive and administrative metadata for collections and related services, parties and activities. The standard also supports the expression of relationships between these entities.
Discovery Portal
The Discovery Portal is an interface to search and display Registry Objects from the RDA Registry , with the ability to display links and relationships between registry objects and external resources. The Portal has many additional functionality to the RDA Registry that is independent and is designed to be decoupled with the RDA Registry, so that it can serve a different registry system, provided the interface is relatively the same
Access Management System
The Access Management System is an interface that enable RDA Registry users as well as users who are authenticated via the Discovery Portal to authenticate and gain access to additional functionality. The Access Management System supports Built In, LDAP, Australian Access Federation (AAF) authentication via Rapid Connect and Shibboleth and various Social Networks, such as Facebook and Twitter. Authenticated users can be granted additional functionality and affiliations to Organisation by an administrator role, via an User Management Interface. This authentication framework is also accessible from the Portal, allowing users to login to MyRDA.
Metadata Harvester
The Harvester is an extensible Python module that enables the processing and routing of content and metadata from a source metadata provider to a target application. The Harvester is used to request, process and route metadata records from a metadata provider’s registry/data store to the Metadata Registry.
Handle Service- Persistent Identifier Service (PIDs)
The Handle service (formerly PIDS) provides a service-oriented framework to support the minting and managing of persistent identifiers (PIs) in an ARDC context. The Handle service is implemented as a Tomcat webapp based around CNRI's Handle technology in accordance with ARDC requirements. The service enables users to create a persistent and resolvable identifier which is mapped to a URI or description. If the location or description for an object changes the identifier reference can be updated without affecting the persistent identifier. When people click on it, the ARDC service re-routes them to whatever location or description is nominated by the identifier owner.