OpenCASA (Open Curatorial and Archival Services Architecture)

OpenCASA is a service architecture, built upon open standards and open source software, providing curatorial and archival functions to applications, such as for ingest, management, discovery, and publishing of digital objects. Services in OpenCASA are influenced by the University of California Curation Center's model of microservices, and perform such functionality as minting and binding durable identifiers, storing arbitrary file structures, versioning, file integrity checking, annotating objects with metadata assertions, and auditing/provenance logging.

OpenCASA is being developed as part of Penn State's Digital Stewardship Program. Development on OpenCASA began as part of the prototype CAPS project. Code is freely available via Github.

We plan to implement OpenCASA services in the Python programming language, leveraging either OpenSRF atop the open XMPP standard or RESTful HTTP atop AMQP queues as our message broker and service architecture.

Contents

This repository contains config files and code for a service architecture where nginx acts as a reverse proxy, or broker, for numerous service instances. Services are Python code run in a RESTful HTTP container. The CAPS application is included as an example of an application that calls the service broker. Example services are storage, identity, and annotate.