The Resource Space Management module provides
seamless access to heterogeneous services. Services in this context refers to services we can access through
a REST/SOAP service calls, reconstructing HTTP calls (i.e., no web service is provided), application layer protocols,
p2p client implementation, etc.
The basic REST interface of ResMan, provides CRUD
operations over the configuration for Resources, Adapters and Actions, being each of these, the basic building blocks to enable the seamless
access to different kinds of resources (such as Google Documents or Wikipedia Articles) and perform actions over them using adapters.
ResMan combined with Karaku form the domain specific Scientific Resource Space Management System,
a middleware to access scientific web resources through a common and uniform model and API.
To read more about the Resman Components, Click here.
ResMan Overview
The logic for accessing data sources is provided by the
Adapters. Adapters
expose the services a given data source can offer. One example of adapter is a
plugin for operating on SVN servers. However, the actual service provider is
called Resource Manager. Thus, an
adapter can be used to access to many resource managers supporting the services
the adapter provides. For example, the SVN adapter can be used to access to
svn.liquidpub.org, svn.myserver.org, and any other site providing SVN functionality.
On top of the logics for accessing data sources, we build the
Adapter Type
abstraction. This allows performing operations on the adapters of the same type
using the same interface. For example, we can create the Control Version System
adapter type in order to operate not only on SVN but also with CVS, and other
distributed control version systems; regardless of the specifics.
The adapter type specifies the type of actions
that adapters should implement. Action Types
are meta-actions encapsulating the services implementation and
specifics of the call and parameters. The Actions
implement the services and therefore are adapter-specific.
Another level of abstraction is the Resource Types.
Resources are type of artifacts (e.g., document, image, workflow, person, etc) with
specific action types associated. These resources types can be supported
by a large number of adapters. A particular instance of a resource type is
called Resource.
These instances are provided by (possibly several) resource managers.
Listings
The following are links to the lists of resources, adapters, action, etc. that will give
some insights about how the systems responds to HTTP Calls. For each of these entities,
the caller can also specify a single id to get a specific instance from the listings
provided by these links.
