Building Infrastructures Using Service Oriented Architectures
In 1995, the US National Agricultural Library (NAL) and four
American land-grant universities launched a project to build a
distributed web gateway to distribute quality and evaluated
agriculture-related information and resources. This modest
AgNIC Alliance
has grown to include 46 member institutions and an extensive network
of inter-connected web-based resources.
In 2003, the Alliance articulated a vision for it to become one of
the “premier comprehensive web portals for international agriculture
and the related sciences using state-of-art technologies.” It wanted
to serve as a “model for collaborative and synergistic provision of
discipline specific electronic information.”
To assist the Alliance and one of its members, the
Arid Lands Information Center,
Precipice articulated a technical vision and developed a technical
architecture based on the service oriented architecture (SOA)
paradigm. The architectural prototype demonstrated how to to deliver
targeted and user-focused services across academic, agency and
public domains.
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