Metadata Representation

Metadata describes the type of measurement data (the eventType), the entity or entities being measured (the subject), and the particular parameters of the measurement.

One key difference UNIS’s metadata representation than perfSONAR’s metadata representation is: the subject is a hyperlink to the actual network resource representation registered at UNIS instance. Two forces are pushing to have the subject to be a hyperlink rather than the actual description of the network resource. The first reason is having a hyperlink in subject allows a better integration between the lookup service and the topology service which allows the user to make topology based queries. The second reason is the Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State (HATEOAS) design constraint of REST. In HATEOAS, client interacts network application entirely through hypermedia provided dynamically by the application server.

JSON Schema

See http://unis.crest.iu.edu/schema/20120709/metadata.

Attributes

Name Value Description
id string Metadata’s locally unique identifier.
ts timestamp time stamp of the last change on the metadata in nano-seconds.
subject href Hyper link reference to Network Resource or Metadata.
parameters object The parameters of the measurement.
eventType string The type of measurement data.

Example

The following is a simple Metadata representation example:

{
    "$schema": "http://unis.crest.iu.edu/schema/20120709/metadata#",
    "id": "123",
    "selfRef": "http://example.com/metadata/123",
    "ts": 1336775637000,
    "subject": {
        "href": "https://example.com/ports/1",
        "rel": "full"
    },
    "eventType": "some event type",
    "parameters": {
        "datumSchema": "http://unis.crest.iu.edu/schema/20120709/datum#",
        "collectionInterval": 30000
    }
}

Actions

  • insert Creates new metadata.
  • list/query Return all metadata registered in the UNIS instance.
  • get Return metadata representation.
  • update Update the specified metadata.
  • delete Delete a metadata.
  • patch patch the specified metadata.