ePIC provides many highly reliable, redundant and performant services to the scientific research community. While some of the services – such the one responsible for PID registration – are the main entry points for the users, other services and activities are essential for providers only. Here is an overview of the most important services offered by ePIC for its providers.
PID Service Software
The PID-Service is the main interface to register and manage persistent identifiers in ePIC . To help the users, the ePIC providers share the same interfaces. The PID-Service is implemented as a RESTful web service and the software is continously being developed by ePIC . Currently, the software is distributed without any support and with a limited documentation only.
PID Replication
The services of ePIC are highly reliable, performant and redundant. Replicating the PID databases is one of the important basis to guarantee an all time availability of the services. Currently, five european data centers work together to replicate each other’s persitent identifiers. When a data center was temporarily not available, the other ePIC centers still resolve the PIDs. To achieve a redundant and load-balanced setup between the data centers, ePIC utilizes the Handle System. Furthermore the resolution services of ePIC are of course also included into the worldwide Handle infrastructure to guarantee a highly reliable and performant resolution of PIDs issued by ePIC .