GWDG CDSTAR

CDSTAR (Common Data Storage ARchitecture) is a head-less data repository and framework for research data management applications. The goal is to provide a rich set of common functionality (scalable storage, publishing, archiving, metadata annotations, access management and search) as a web-service for other applications to build upon, and to simplify the rapid development of highly customized tools and workflows for data-heavy research applications.

CDSTAR is developed at GWDG as open-source (apache licence 2.0) and offered to our customers as a fully managed service (including storage, backup and long-term archiving), or as a self-hosted solution for individual use-cases. Please contact support for details.

Source code, binary builds and documentation for recent CDSTAR versions (3.x) can be found at cdstar.gwdg.de. We provide a public API demo (username: test, password:test) for quick tests. Please note that the demo instance is wiped clean at least once a day. You can also run a local or self-hosted instance as described here, or contact support for a hosted instance.

All functionality is provided as a simple language-independent web API, so any generic HTTP client library or even curl would be suitable to integrate CDSTAR with new or existing applications. Specialized client libraries and command-line tools are available for python3 (see pycdstar3) and Java. Other language integrations may also be available by third-party.

The legacy version of CDSTAR (version 2.x) is still supported for existing projects. Source code is available on request. Documentation can be found here.