DOI: 10.17587/prin.8.448-455

Architectural and Technological Aspects of the Development and Maintenance of Large Information Analysis Systems in the Area of Science and Education

V. A. Vasenin, vasenin@msu.ru, M. A. Zanchurin, maxim.zanchurin@gmail.com, A. S. Kozitsyn, alexanderkz@mail.ru, M. A. Krivchikov, maxim.krivchikov@gmail.com, D. A. Shachnev, mitya57@mitya57.me, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, 119991, Russian Federation

Corresponding author: Vasenin Valery A., Dr. Sc., Professor, Head of the Chair, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, 119991, Russian Federation E-mail: vasenin@msu.ru

Mechanisms for managing the scientific, technical and educational activity are a subject of a special attention of the government. With the emergence of packet communications technologies and tools, and the Internet meta-network and technologies based on it, at the beginning of 21st century there were all prerequisites ready for creating systems available to collect, store and analyze large amounts of scientometrical data in an immediate manner. The present article considers the architectural and technological aspects of the development and maintenance of such large information analysis systems in the area of science and education, based on the example of the "ISTINA" system (referred to as System throughout the text). The main requirements to the System architecture include:

1. modularity and scalability, on the macro-level of system description as well as on the underlying levels;
2. hierarchical organization and orientation on processes;
3. completeness of the reflection of all processes currently in demand and for the foreseeable future that are automatized within the System;
4. taking processes of interaction with external databases storing various kinds of auxiliary data into account.

The technological principles include:

• compliance with regulations relating to systems of national importance;
• adherence to the main provisions of software engineering at all stages of the System life cycle;
• using the mechanisms of collaboration and integration with the external and internal data bases taking the confidentiality requirements into account.

The System architecture reflects the ontological model of the scientometrics using its representation as the subject area on which the System is oriented. The integrating mechanisms of the System are implemented using a relational database, the structure of which reflects the main aspects of the ontology, and a set of applications using that database. One of the natural models for representing the objects in the System database is the graph model. A visual ontology editor for working with graph is being developed at the moment. Investigations on using the ontologies in the system architecture are considered as one of the most perspective development directions of such systems by the developers. With regards to technological aspects this article describes approaches to source code management and continuous integration; processing the users requests and bug reports; tools for preparing the documentation packages for the System; experience with upgrading to the new version of Django framework.

Keywords: information analysis systems, science and education, scientometrics, software engineering, distributed systems, software architecture

pp. 448–455

For citation:
Vasenin V. A., Zanchurin M. A., Kozitsyn A. S., Krivchikov M. A., Shachnev D. A. Architectural and Technological Aspects of the Development and Maintenance of Large Information Analysis Systems in the Area of Science and Education, Programmnaya Ingeneria, 2017, vol. 8, no. 10, pp. 448—455.