Replication framework for regional and thematic portals in GBIF network
Donald Hobern, Giorgos Ksouris, Ciprian Vizitiu & Hannu Saarenmaa. GBIF Secretariat, Universitetsparken 15, DK-2100 Copenhagen, hostmaster@gbif.orgGBIF information system reached operational phase in early 2004 and is scaling up rapidly. Tens of millions of data records are already being served by nearly one hundred data providers. The data providers announce their availability in GBIF's global registry http://registry.gbif.net/. GBIF Data Portal http://www.gbif.net/ indexes the records on the providers and offers a user interface for searching, browsing, displaying and downloading the data. Operating this service has high availability requirements which calls for a mirroring solution. There also is a need to implement a distributed architecture with regional and thematic portals that use the relevant parts of shared indexed data. Data for one region or theme can originate from any data provider in the world, so it is not sufficient for a regional or thematic portal to index its known "partnering" providers. The poster describes the requirements and status of implementation for replication of the GBIF Data Portal components in this context. The strategy includes support for distributed execution of Data Portal administrative functions to maintain the Data Index, distributed execution of the Data Portal interface and services for data access, and implementation of local shadows of Data Portal components deployed as regional or thematic portals.