The BRICKS infrastructure - an overview

The aim of the BRICKS project is to design, develop and maintain an open user and service-oriented infrastructure to share knowledge and resources in the Cultural Heritage domain. Typical usage scenarios are integrated queries among several knowledge resource, e.g. to discover all Italian artifacts from renaissance in the European museums or to follow the life cycle of historic documents. These examples are specific applications, which are running on top of the BRICKS infrastructure. The BRICKS infrastructure will use the Internet as a backbone and will fulfil the requirements of expandability, graduality of engagement, scalability, availability, and interoperability. In addition, the user community has the economic requirement to be low-cost. This means (1) that an institution should be able to become a BRICKS member with minimal investments, and (2) that the maintenance costs of the infrastructure, and in consequence the running costs of each BRICKS member, are minimised. Also, the BRICKS membership will be flexible, such that parties can join or leave the system at any point in time without administrative overheads. In order to fulfil these requirements the BRICKS architecture will be decentralised, based on a peer-to-peer (P2P) paradigm, i.e. no central server will be employed. Every member institution of a BRICKS installation is a node (a BNode in the BRICKS jargon) of the distributed architecture. The foundation components (bricks, in the BRICKS jargon) making up the BRICKS architecture are Web Services, and provide functionalities for maintaining the system, for contentand metadata management, or security. Applications are composed out of these base components and can add new ones to provide additional functionalities.