GSAC Federation

This site no longer maintained and here for archival purposes.

Two or more GSAC repositories may choose to collaborate to offer a single "federated" GSAC repository which, while maintaining the independence of each individual GSAC repository, allows for merged or joint searches of all the collaborating GSACs at once.

A federated GSAC is an independent GSAC and is a new separate GSAC installation. Unlike a basic data repository GSAC, it does not use a local database with information about local data resources. Rather it "knows about" two or more other data repository GSACs, and queries them for information, using their published API search capabiliities. A federated GSAC does not store any data from the collaborating individual GSAC repositories, but instead dynamically queries two or more participating GSAC repositories directly through their locally implemented GSAC APIs. Among several advantages, this means a federated GSAC always shows the most recent data available from the collaborating individual GSAC repositories.

Installing a federated GSAC is different from installing a data repository GSAC. See GSAC installation README Part 1. A federated GSAC can run on a web server remote from servers at data repositories with databases and FTP/HTML download of data files. Or one web server can run one or more individual (data repository) GSAC repositories, and a federated GSAC, at the same time with no internal connections between them.

Last modified: 2019-12-24  02:29:47  America/Denver