Technical Glossary

• ANDS Collections Registry
• ANDS Self-Service Identifiers

• ANDS Collections Registry Web Services These are listed at: https://services.ands.org.au/home/orca/services/index.php
• ANDS Persistent Identifier Service

The Collection Services Infrastructure (COSI) Framework is a web application framework which stores information about roles, activities and authorisations in order to control access to web application functionality.

The framework is designed to house applications that utilise its Application Programming Interface (API).
This software utility underpins all of the ANDS web applications.

The ANDS Collections Registry holds collection description information - information about collections and the activities, parties and services (for example, RSS feeds) which relate to collections. The ANDS Collections Registry has been established to improve the capacity of Australian institutional repositories, archives and data centres to share and enable discovery of collection-level information.

The information in the ANDS Collections Registry provides the content for the Research Data Australia web pages.

The ANDS Collections Registry accepts collection descriptions in an XML format called Registry Interchange Format–Collections and Services (RIF-CS).

Ingest to the ANDS Collections Registry is supported by ANDS Collections Registry Web Services and the ANDS Collection Registry Online Service.

ANDS Collection Registry Online Services includes an OAI-PMH Data Provider Service (‘OAI Provider’). A complete list of ANDS Collections Registry Online Services is found here:
https://services.ands.org.au/home/orca/services/index.php

The ANDS Collections Registry includes an Online Service which allows manual data entry of collection description information.

The ANDS Collections Registry is underpinned by the ORCA Registry software utility running within an instance of the COSI framework software utility.

• can import RIF-CS conforming XML data over HTTP
• can export RIF-CS conforming XML data over HTTP (providing data for use by external services and enabling federation of registries)
• provides public access to a web-based user interface for searching, browsing (discovery) and indexing by search engines such as Google of data in the registry.
• allows manual input, edit and deletion of RIF-CS registry objects

This software utility, running within an instance of the COSI Framework, underpins the ANDS Collections Registry.

The ANDS Harvester is a software utility which provides a service-oriented framework to support the processing and routing of content and metadata from a source data provider to a target application.
The ANDS Harvester supports only machine-to-machine transactions.
The ANDS Harvester provides the ORCA Registry with scheduled, recurring, asynchronous harvesting of RIF-CS.
The ANDS Harvester enables a RIF-CS harvest over OAI-PMH The ANDS Harvester provides a machine-based mechanism for data to be lodged in the ANDS Collections Registry.

A persistent identifier is a number or code that is allocated to a resource as a long lived identifier.
Persistent identifiers provide a globally unique identification. Persistent Identifiers are stored in a database along with the Internet location of the object that they identify.
When the object changes location on the Internet, it does not change persistent identifier.
If any links to the resource were based on the persistent identifier then the owner of the resource is able to communicate with the persistent identifier database and change the object location associated with the persistent identifier.

The ANDS Persistent Identifiers (PIDS) Web Service enables the minting, updating and resolving of persistent identifiers by software applications which require these services.
This is a machine-to-machine service.
The ANDS Persistent Identifier Service is cost-free to publicly funded Australian research, higher education, government and cultural collections organisations.
This service uses the Handles System:http://www.handle.net/
This service is underpinned by the ANDS Persistent Identifier Web Service.

Research Data Australia is a mesh of publicly available interlinked web pages describing (and where possible linking to) Australian research data collections and cultural collections.
The information on the Research Data Australia pages comes from the ANDS Collections registry. Research Data Australia pages are highly findable using the Google internet search engine.
Research Data Australia pages are created by the ANDS Data Pages Generator software utility.

The ANDS Data Pages Generator software utility exposes the collections description information stored in the ANDS Collections Registry as user friendly web pages. This software utility underpins the Research Data Australia.

• the ANDS Persistent Identifier Service; and
• the Persistent Identifiers GUI software utility, which is housed in the same instance of the COSI Framework as the ORCA Registry

Access to the ANDS Self Service Identifiers functionality is limited to individuals who are members of the AAF.

RIF-CS is a format defined using XML which enables the exchange of collection description information.

RIF-CS is based on ISO2146 but only includes those elements needed for a collection service registry rather than comprising a full binding to the standard.

The RIF-CS schema has an accompanying set of suggested vocabularies.

The RIF-CS primary registry object type is a collection. A collection in the RIF-CS Schema context could be a repository, a registry, a collective work or an index/database. RIF-CS also supports other registry object types-services, activities and parties. Any or all of these along with their relations to each other are able to be expressed in RIF-CS format.