MORe: a Micro-service Oriented Aggregator

Abstract

Metadata aggregation is a task increasingly encountered in many projects involving data repositories. The small number of specialized software for this task indicates that in most cases customized software is used to perform aggregation, which in turn relates to the highly complex tasks and architectures involved. In this paper, the metadata and object repository aggregator (MORe) is presented, which has been effectively used in numerous projects and provides an easy and flexible way of aggregating metadata from multiple sources and in multiple formats. Its flexible and scalable architecture exploits cloud technologies and allows storing content into different storage systems, defining workflows dynamically and extending the system with external services. One of the most important aspects of MORe is its curation/enrichment services which allow curation managers to automatically apply and execute enrichment plans employing enrichment micro-services in order to aggregated data.