Use case

CNRS - Huma-Num Nakala

Nakala - Data silo for the humanities and social sciences

The mission of the CNRS Très grande Infrasctructure de Recherche Huma-Num is to offer digital services to researchers in the humanities and social sciences. As part of this mission, it wishes to provide researchers with a data hosting and distribution platform: Nakala.

Nakala enables data to be stored and archived perennially, described (using dcterms metadata), and redistributed in the form of OAI streams, dereferenceable URIs, and SPARQL service. Nakala demonstrates the flexibility of Web of Data technologies compared with other dissemination technologies such as OAI. More information on the solution implemented is available on the Nakala service description page.

In terms of technology, the proposed solution stands out for its use of a Virtuoso triplestore as the central point of the architecture (no relational database), and for the implementation of open-source components: PROAI for the OAI part, PUBBY for metadata access, and integration with the Renater identity federation authentication system.