This repository contains an Asset Manager (AM) to manage data sets for access to an installation of Open Visualisation Environment (OVE), as well as a high speed proxy to provide authenticated access to data from a range of sources.
The Asset Manager stores files in an S3 compatible object Store, such as Minio. One instance of the Asset Manager can work with multiple stores.
An Asset is a collection of one or more files that can be treated as a single unit and versioned, processed and displayed together. Each asset has associated metadata (e.g. processing state, name, description, tags, etc.).
Assets (and non-asset objects in JSON format) can be grouped together into a Project. While the AM does not assign any specific meaning to a project, and allows you to group assets by any criteria, other tools may interpret projects as indicating that particular content should be displayed together (e.g., a gallery might display all of the assets in a selected project).
Each time any file in an asset is updated, a new Version of the whole asset is recorded. Previous versions of the asset are retained, and can still be accessed.
Workers can be scheduled to asynchronously perform a task performed on a file, such as converting it to a new file format. Workers operate non-destructively and do not modify or delete uploaded files, so do not create new versions of an asset when they run.
The Asset Manager is split into 3 parts:
- The Backend exposes a full RESTful API for operations on projects, assets and files. This service can work independently from all the other services.
- The Read proxy exposes an HTTP endpoint to read individual files off the object store. The AM Read Proxy is authenticated by the same rules as the Backend service.
- The UI exposes a User Interface for most of the operations performed by the Backend service.
The Workers asynchronously perform additional tasks on assets:
- Unzip: please see the worker documentation for more details
- DeepZoomImage: please see the worker documentation for more details
- Tulip network layout: please see the worker documentation for more details