Introduction
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The Heterogeneous Data Centre (HDC) project supersedes the Materials Data Centre (MDC), a JISC-funded initiative to build an infrastructure for materials scientists and engineers for the management of the wide variety of data produced by materials engineers.

The HDC model uses a combination of a flexible, user specifiable and compoundable metadata database connected to a generic data store, in this case a file system. The architecture permits: the storage and sharing of any data files, limited in size only by the file system; the ability for users to define their own metadata and metadata structures; and relationships between data sets to be defined. 

The following is a list of the components for the Heterogeneous Data Centre:

  - Metadata database
  - File/Database Synchronisation Service
  - SharePoint GUI

This is described in the Documentation.pdf file


HDC Installation and Configuration Options
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HDCInstaller: Copies all of the necessary components and launches a configuration program.

HDCConfiguration: A configuration program for editing HDC settings (an a library in dotnetfx35 and dotnetfx40 for HDC components to use).


HDC SharePoint GUI
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HDCSharePointToolkit: Contains the feature definition that pulls in the web parts and layout pages (creates a WSP).

	HDCLayouts: Contains supporting ASP.NET application pages, style sheets and javascript sources for supporting the HDCSharePointToolkit

	WebControls: Contains ASP.NET user controls that are used in the HDC web parts

	WebParts: The SharePoint web parts that are deployed using the HDCSharePointToolkit


HDCSharePointToolkitDeploy: A console application that handles the deployment of the SharePoint WSP.



HDC File/Database Synchronisation Service
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HDCMetadataSyncService: A Windows service that monitors the file system for file modifications and updates a database. It also has a regular task that checks for consistency.

	HDCExperimentTracker: Used for holding metadata from a database, file system etc, and for identifying differences between them



Misc folders
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HDCWebServices: A web service layer for depositing into the HDC from EPrints


HDCDataAccess: Contains shared libraries for accessing the metadata database and file system.



A note about naming
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The Heterogeneous Data Centre (HDC) has evolved from a previous project known as the Materials Data Centre (MDC). The majority of the code has been refactored to use the new name but there may be some places where old names are still used. three examples are:

	The Entity Framework model is still known as MaterialsMetadata. The model is used in so many places, it was felt it better to do this rename carefully.
	
	The names in the data service layer that came from the EP2DC/MDC project has been left alone, including MDC data types.
	
	The database schema still uses the term "Experiment" for a "Container" which has come from the Engineering ancestry. This rename again is a large task and will need to be done at another time.


Build instructions
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The hdcbuildscript should do everything for you and create a setup.exe and an msi file in HDCInstaller\PackagedHDCInstaller.