Archive Import Service Sample Clauses

Archive Import Service. The Archive Import Service (AIS) is in charge of defining collections and importing their content into the gCube infrastructure, by interacting with the Collection Management service, the Content Management service and other services at the content management layer, such as the Metadata Manager Service. While the functionality it offers is, from a logical point of view, well defined and rather confined, the AIS must be able to deal with a large number of different ways to define collections and offer extensibility features so to accommodate types of collections and ways to describe them not known/required at the time of its initial design. These needs impact on the architecture of the service and on its interface. From an architectural point of view, the AIS offers the possibility to add new functionality by using pluggable software modules. At the interface level, high flexibility is ensured by relying on a scripting language used to define import tasks, rather than on a interface with fixed parameters only. As importing collections might be an expensive task, resource-wise, the AIS offers features that can be used to optimize import tasks. In particular, it supports incremental import of collections. The description that follows introduces first the rationale behind the functionality of the AIS, its overall architecture, its scripting language, its extensibility features, and the concepts related to incremental import. Then, it presents the interface of the service. Overall, the execution of an import task can be thought as divided in two main phases