lschieren/dnscore

The Core System of the DA-NRW Software Suite.

DNSCore

Dokumentation der DA-NRW Software Suite (DNS)

Liste der Kernfunktionen

SIP-Builder HERUNTERLADEN

Please download the SIP-Builder here

The Core System of the DA-NRW Software Suite.

The DNS software relies exclusively on existing open source software components to implement a distributed, self- validating repository, allowing depositors a high degree of control over the methods applied to individual objects submitted for preservation and distribution.

As a result of various research programs in the recent years there are some software solutions available which handle preservation tasks. Since each of these solutions was designed under a different focus and to solve different sets of problems within the field of longterm preservation, it is worth mentioning the two most distinctive features of DNSCore at first, before diving in into a richer feature list.

The first big feature is the possibility for users to let the system automatically generate derivates of your material destined for long term preservation which are suited for online web presentation. The decision to integrate a presentation component deep into the core of the software was originally politically motivated as it was a state financed open source project and the idea to let the general public have a share on cultural material accumulated in a state wide archive was only natural in the context of this background. Also due to the technical possibilities of the digital domain it is relatively easy to do so and give users access to this material in an easy and uncomplicated way and this seems contemporary because users nowadays are used to get the information they want as they are used to it in everyday internet life anyway. We think of it as a really great feature.

While implementing this feature there was some confusion when speaking of DIPs as stated in the OAIS reference model as DIPs can designate any material accessed by the users of such a system and the DIPs accessed from the long term component differ a lot from those accessed via the presentation component. As a consequence we decided to reflect these distinctions in a concise way in order to make communication easier. So we introduced the concept of PIPs (Presentation Information Package) into our model, which is an extension to the OAIS model specifically targeted at our needs.

The second big feature is the so called Delta-Feature. With deltas users can make additions to contents already present in the long term archive. This feature is also deeply integrated into the basic architecture of the software. Also it needed to create an object model that is in line with the OAIS reference model but is more complicated in its specifics since the software must handle the organization of objects and packages in the background. So when we speak of an object in the context of DNSCore as our main entity in the object model, we have a unit of data which can consist of data of more than one package/SIP at the same time.

For a more extensive feature list, see here

Documentation

For Documentation see:

• Documentation. English version
• Documentation. German version

Building the application

Prerequisites:

JAVA 1.8 (Building DA-Web needs 1.6) 
MAVEN
GIT 
Imagemagick 6.7.8 (with jasper, to use jpg2000, with tiff)
Please ensure, the shells (bash and sh) of your workstation run in UTF-8 mode:


export MAVEN_OPTS='-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8'
export JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS=-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8
export LANG='de_DE.UTF-8'

The following five commands will get you started:

git clone https://github.com/da-nrw/DNSCore DNSCore
cd DNSCore/DNSCommon
mvn install
cd ../ContentBroker
mvn clean && mvn verify

These commands will download the sourcecode, deploy the DNSCommon Library to your local Maven Repository, build the ContentBroker using the library, and execute an automated acceptance test suite against a running ContentBroker which will get installed from an automatically generated installer. You'll find these at:

DNSCore/ContentBroker/target/installation
DNSCore/ContentBroker/target/ContentBroker

For more information on building and testing DNSCore look here