YourSRB: A cross platform interface for SRB and Digital Libraries

Many large scale research programs with massive data requirements (e.g. the Particle Physics Data Grid, the Biomedical Informatics Research Network) use SRB to manage research data collections. Despite this broad adoption, the potential of SRB and Data Grids is not fully utilized by the general research community. The reason for this under utilisation comes in part from the complexity of the Data Grid model and the lack of quality interfaces to SRB, making it difficult to use and configure. YourSRB, is a system developed in the course of our research which provides an intuitive interface to SRB and aims to enable a broader community to benefit from SRB. The system also simplifies the use of SRB’s awkward-to-initiate federation schemes, making SRB more suitable for use as the core of an organisational level research repository. In addition, our approach to federation makes the YourSRB system suitable for field workers who can off-line curate and annotate data, and subsequently federate their data with a primary store when network connectivity is available. YourSRB also implements data description and retrieval capabilities, enabling the effective management of massive data sets over multiple storage resources.