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The Entity Registry and Model Repository tool (ERMR) is an open-source middleware component designed to implement a long-term data preservation environment to manage large collections of scientific data, replicated across different research projects, which may form the basis of international collaborations.

The ERMR was developed in response to PERICLES user requirements, which highlight many challenges relating to access and curation of scientific data. The ERMR follows the project’s information model to depict the semantics of the data and their interrelationships, which may be used as the basis for automatically deriving and annotating links (LRM); and the QA approach to ensure that the right data is accessible easily, and the obsolete data gets removed or refreshed. The overall aim is not simply to place data in a data repository, but to share large quantities of raw data, pre-processed data, and post-processed data across many collaborators on a regular basis.

The ERMR is designed as a federated system, using the Apache Cassandra database, providing access to distributed repositories of scientific and experimental data. The design of this tool has evolved from mainly an iRODS-based system, to the latest version, which can support potentially any storage technology, including CEPH. Within the PERICLES project, the ERMR is used to in managing the data life cycle, or continuum, across shared collections in ways that might foster collaborations and data re-use.

The overall aim is not simply to place data in a data repository, but to share large quantities of raw data, pre-processed data, and post-processed data across many collaborators on a regular basis. This has required the incorporation of tables and fact stores, required for the LRM, which go further than object storage technologies in managing the data archive.

Features include:

• High performance network data transfer
• Easy back up and replication
• Metadata management
• Controlled access through ACLs
• Management of large collections, including audit trails
• Workflows executed as part of normal operation
• A listener that will invoke action scripts

ERMR was created for the PERICLES project (http://www.pericles-project.eu/).