Architecture Overview

As a platform, DiSSCo sits in between data providers and data consumers. The core architecture adds value by harmonizing data to openDS, minting unique identifiers for specimens and media objects, capturing provenance, and, of course, facilitating annotations. As DiSSCo improves the data, DiSSCo will send this enhanced data upstream, back to the data providers, and downstream, to data aggregators (though this functionality is currently in development).

The DiSSCo position in the biodiversity data landscape is illustrated in the following diagram. On the left, data providers send data to the core infrastructure. In the middle, machine and human agents rest on top of the core infrastructure, adding additional value. On the right, the enriched data is sent to data consumers.

The DiSSCo data infrastructure is an implementation of Digital Specimen architecture (DSArch) for its core services together with end-user services that connect with these core services. An overview is given in the picture below with core services in green and end-user services in blue:

The DiSSCo infrastructure is hosted on AWS and provisioned through Terraform, an Infrastructure as Code tool. The infrastructure code is stored in its own repository. It is deployed through Kubernetes, and the deployment code is stored in a separate repository.