Exporting data out of a research infrastructure entails retrieving data from the data curation subsystem and delivering it to an external resource. This process must be brokered by the data use and data publishing subsystems.

Generally requests for data to be exported to an external resource originate from a virtual laboratory. All requests are validated by the AAAI service via its authorise action interface. The laboratory provides an interface to an external resource (this might take the form of a URI and a preferred data transfer protocol) and submits a request to a data broker in the data publishing subsystem via its data request interface. The data broker will translate any valid requests into actions; in this scenario, a data transfer request is sent to the data transfer service within the data curation subsystem.

The data transfer service will configure and deploy a data exporter; this exporter will retrieve data from all necessary data stores, opening a data-flow from data store to external resource. The exporter is also responsible for the repackaging of exported datasets where necessary – this includes the integration of any additional metadata or provenance information stored separately within the infrastructure that needs to be packaged with a dataset if it is to be used independently of the infrastructure. As such, the exporter can invoke the catalogue service to retrieve additional meta-information via its export metadata interface.