CERF Core Software Relationships and Structure

TECHNOLOGY BUILT ON SCIENCE AND BUSINESS PRIORITIES

Software for professional scientists and researchers as a way of documenting, sharing, and protecting their work.

The system architecture of Rescentris’ CERF solutions was implemented to meet all of the requirements of an enterprise ELN and scientific content management solution to serve the needs of the life sciences and general research community for the near and long-term. CERF was designed to have a highly modular rather than monolithic architecture to enable ease of updates, adaptation, customization, and integration. The core semantic technologies infrastructure unifies the set of managed components that together make up the product and its market-driven features for managing research content and lab records.

Core CERF Software Structure

CERF’s multi-tier services-oriented model includes:

• Application- and web-based local clients (cross-platform Java, iPad, etc.)
• Java servlet and Java Server Pages (JSP) middleware tier
• Business-logic tier consisting of implementations of a number of CERF APIs
• Persistence tier containing both relational and object data stores
• Back-end service tier for accessing distributed computational and storage functionality, plus multiple tiers of data caching for high performance

The core of CERF is based upon extensive experience and research into industry requirements (principally in biotech, academic, and pharma preclinical biological research). These requirements informed the general design of the extensible ELN platform. The system architecture was based upon both traditional technologies (e.g., relational database/SQL) and more advanced technologies (e.g., web services, RDF/OWL, XML messaging).
The result was the multi-tiered client/server CERF application framework incorporating Java as the programming language (to achieve cross-platform independence), XML as a fundamental representation of messages (our own web service model), and metadata (RDF). The core functionality of the system is represented declaratively in a set of related, controlled vocabularies and ontologies (OWL/XML Schema).
Full architectural and technical documentation is available to qualified customers.