Engineering Viewpoint (Draft)

The Engineering Viewpoint is concerned with transparently distributing the objects defined in the computational viewpoint ( Computational Viewpoint) over nodes, either physical and/or virtual. It is concerned with the structure of the nodes. The definition of the engineering viewpoint includes the description of structures needed to supporting information viewpoint objects objects ( IV objects ), and for the specification of the communicating channels between nodes. The Engineering Viewpoint is also concerned with supporting non-functional requirements relating to performance, reliability, load-balancing, and other similar, which correspond to the objectives and policies defined in the SV Communities ^{EVFootnoteLinington01}

In specifying the Engineering viewpoint (EV) in the ENVRI RM, the main aim is to control and constrain the architectural style to be adopted at interaction points between RIs to improve the interoperability between RIs; without the need of investment in expensive peer-to-peer transformation/interworking/gateway functionalities. The aim is NOT to control the internal engineering of individual RIs, and thus less emphasis will be given to these aspects when specifying the EV.

This engineering viewpoint specification is designed to research data management functionalities which are commonly shared among more than one RI (Identification and Citation, Curation, Cataloguing, Processing, and Provenance)  ^{Footnote02,  Footnote03}.

The presentation of the Engineering Viewpoint is divided in three parts: container structure, engineering objects, and object configuration.

• Container Structure (Draft) provides the detailed description of the recommended of structure to be used for distributing the engineering objects .
• Engineering Objects (Draft) describes the main objects to be modelled in the EV.
• Object Configuration (Draft) illustrates how the services are used for supporting a set of functionalities which are commonly exposed and used by RIs