The DNER Technical Architecture: scoping the information environment
Andy Powell, Elizabeth Lyon · The University of Bath Online Publications Store (The University of Bath) · 2001
The Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) [1] is a managed information environment for accessing quality assured Internet resources from many sources. These resources include scholarly journals, monographs, textbooks, learning objects, abstracts, manuscripts, maps, music scores, still images, geospatial images and other kinds of vector and numeric data, as well as moving picture and sound collections. This study describes the technical architecture of the DNER. The intention is to underpin the development the DNER as a managed collection of resources in an integrated information environment. The DNER information environment will allow the end-user to interact with the DNER as a coherent whole, rather than as a set of individual collections and services. We describe the network services (and the standards and protocols that enable those services to work together) that must be put in place in order to achieve that aim. This study describes a generic architecture: it does not say how or by whom the various services described here might actually be implemented. A further stage of this work will develop a DNER Service Delivery Architecture that will drill down to actual DNER service components and the relationships between them. This study forms part of a range of materials concerning the architecture of the DNER, available through the DNER Architecture Web site [2].