You are here: Home / Products & Services / Mediaflux / Product Overview

Mediaflux™ is an operating system for data and metadata, providing a comprehensive platform of services for rapidly developing and deploying applications to create, manipulate and manage data in single user or collaborative environments. Mediaflux combines a multi-versioned metadata management and revision control system with many other services including geo-location, workflow, federation, replication, and web serving into a single package that is simple to install, operate and administer.

Mediaflux addresses a key customer need to classify and order data in such a way that it is readily available to all (with appropriate authorisation) for collaboration and consumption. Data is easily found and delivered to the right place, at the right time, in the right format; all the while keeping an audit trail as data is ingested, stored, transformed, and consumed.

Mediaflux is deployed in a two-tier client server architecture, combining a client and one or more Mediaflux servers. Mediaflux contains its own embedded web server, database and services such as a scheduler. The architecture performs significantly better than other architectures where there are network connections between the business logic and data tiers.

Mediaflux clients include the general purpose Arcitecta Desktop and Aterm, and special purpose and third party clients such as DaRIS, nQuisitor, WildHealth, MACDDAP, Clinical Knowledge Manager, Clinical Viewer, and Clinical Hub.

Key Features

• Multi-user platform for ingesting and storing any type of data - upload and download data, from a single file to thousands, from a single byte to terabytes
• Geo-location - n-dimensional point data and polygons may be associated with data
• Automated metadata extraction from data - metadata can also be added manually at any time; metadata enables discovery of data and can conform to any standard or to your own customised schema
• Flexible metadata management - metadata document definitions can be updated at any time on a live system
• Discovery - sophisticated query facilities, including multi-expression evaluation per object in a single pass, support for XPath expressions, partial execution, complex sorting based on XPaths, and dynamic pre-computation using object collections
• Designed for large data - scales to billions of files and petabytes of data: large datasets may be packaged based on patterns defining which files to process or ignore, which to coalesce and which are related
• Replication - data can be automatically shared to multiple systems

• Federation - search across multiple systems, loosely coupled, exponentially scalable

• Workflow - support for simple or complex workflows and business processes; deliver data to external applications and systems for transformation
• Versioning - earlier versions are automatically preserved when data is updated
• Traceable - trace results back to source data
• Integrated with tiered data stores - data can be streamed to lowest cost tier
• High performance - parallel I/O for ingestion and replication
• Auditing - all operations captured in an audit trail
• Access control - flexible access control based on hierarchical (actor, control, subject) triplets; access control lists and fine grain control to metadata document level
• Integration - can integrate with any other system
• Low cost of ownership with bounded and known costs and commercial grade support.

Arcitecta Archive

• Coalesce many files into a single archive (AAR) - up to 2^63 bytes
• Automatically re-inflate on extraction
• Significantly reduce the number (and potentially the size) of files under management leading to disk I/O and network I/O savings
• Parallel compression and decompression, which drastically improves compression and decompression times on multi-CPU machines
• Extract individual files from an AAR and transmit to a client without intermediate decompression
• Table of Contents can be extracted and stored locally
• Archives can be split and merged without decompression/recompression.

Where is Mediaflux used?

Mediaflux is applicable to a wide range of markets. Industries enjoying its rich feature set today include:

Research

Mediaflux is utilised in a wide range of research contexts for managing data from sources including genomics, neuroimaging (including DICOM format MR images), microscopy, oceanography, meteorology, and general e-Research. Mediaflux automates the ingestion, discovery, and transformation of large volumes of data (in terms of both capacity and the number of files).

e-Health

Mediaflux is used to manage clinical and research data in oncology and immigrant health. Mediaflux can service both clinical and de-identified research data needs within the one federated system, removing the need to build separate clinical and research systems.

Mediaflux is used to federate data and present a single view to clinicians, regardless of the institution that holds the source data.

Mediaflux is the foundation for Clinical Knowledge Manager (www.openEHR.org/knowledge), a system for collaborative development, management and publishing of a wide range of clinical knowledge resources, including archetypes, templates, terminology subsets, artefact release sets, and metadata relating to clinical models.

Geospatial

The geo-location features of Mediaflux are utilised to ingest, catalogue, quality assure, store, discover, and distribute geospatial imagery. Metadata is automatically extracted from a number of geospatial data types. Mediaflux is used to manage rasters, maps, documents, etc., as well as temporal data including full motion video.

Mediaflux is used to locate data spatially, including data related to a search area in some way (e.g. inside, outside, intersecting or covering the search area, or within a specified radius from a point).

Mediaflux incorporates a geospatial feature database of over 7 million place names.

Others

Mediaflux is utilised for the management of audio and video data in both research and digital production contexts.

You are here: Home / Products & Services / Mediaflux / Technical Details

Mediaflux is deployed in a two-tier client server architecture, combining a client and one or more Mediaflux servers. Mediaflux eliminates the need to develop most application independent infrastructure, allowing resources to be concentrated on application specific aspects such as business logic and user interfaces. The architecture performs significantly better than other architectures where there are network connections between the business logic and data tiers.

Mediaflux has the following environmental dependencies:

• A Java Virtual Machine (JVM) version 1.5 or later
• A host environment consisting of an operating system and storage.

There are no other dependencies. Mediaflux contains its own embedded web server, object database and services such as a scheduler.

Mediaflux implements a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Everything is a service. Mediaflux can be extended by installing additional plugin services. Plugin services can be installed into a live system. The plugin services are version controlled, and access controlled using standard Mediaflux features, as the plugin services are data, like any other data managed by Mediaflux.

Those services may communicate with any external system, using technologies that are appropriate for that system. For example, communication may be via JDBC, web-services, drop folders, message queues, e-mail, etc. The entire gamut of possibilities can be catered for. Similarly, external systems can make calls directly to Mediaflux via a diverse number of protocols.

The service interface, business logic and data are client independent. They can be accessed directly from the command-line, other systems or for most users, a user interface such as the Arcitecta Desktop. Multiple concurrent interfaces can be in operation at the same time.

Authentication and Authorisation

The server can be configured to use an LDAP repository for authentication and group/role identification. If Active Directory is used, then it is configured for Kerberos. It is possible to operate the server with a mixture of local Mediaflux domains and Active Directory/LDAP domains. The server can send e-mail.

Access control is based on hierarchical (actor, control, subject) triplets, access control lists and fine grain control to the metadata document level.

Communications can be limited to encrypted communications only, from specific IP address ranges, etc. The system will automatically black list IP addresses that exceed configurable failure thresholds. White lists may also be specified. Access to services is very tightly controlled.

XML Metadata

All metadata is managed using XML, to ensure maximum system and application interoperability. The inbuilt XSLT processor allows dynamic generation of any other text format such as HTML, text, etc.

Client Requirements

Client Software

• Aterm command line console application
• Arcitecta Desktop (optional).

Interfaces & Software Development Kits

Additionally, Mediaflux includes software development kits for creating thin and thick (including middleware) clients, transformations, content analysis and indexing, dynamic web-server pages and workflow processes.

The Mediaflux API supports the following interfaces:

• Java via Mediaflux's Java SDK
• Microsoft .NET (VB.NET, C# or any other CLI compliant language) via the Mediaflux .NET Client DLL
• Google Web Toolkit (GWT) client library for Web applications
• Javascript client library for Web applications
• REST-style XML interface over HTTP/S
• SOAP Web Service interface which provides direct access to all 700+ Mediaflux services
• Additionally, any command-line or shell based client application (e.g. Perl, Python, Ruby) can be supported via the Mediaflux command line tool (ATERM).

Server Requirements

Mediaflux is pure Java, with some optional native extensions for administration on Windows based platforms such as installing the server as a Windows service. Mediaflux will run on any Java 1.5+ compatible server. Mediaflux is tested and deployed on Windows 2000 / 2003 / XP / Vista / 7, Linux, Solaris, IRIX, AIX, and Mac OS/X. Mediaflux can be installed on desktop PC's to support small workgroups through to high-performance computing (HPC) systems with hundreds or thousands of CPU's for data and compute intensive applications.

The specifications of a Mediaflux server system depend largely on the number of concurrent users and transaction rates. There are Mediaflux deployments on laptops that support a few users, while others deployments run on multi-processor machines to support hundreds of users.

Minimum Server Requirements

• 512MB RAM
• Pentium III (1GHz) (or equivalent)
• Oracle JRE 1.5+.

Supported Databases

Mediaflux uses its own embedded, high-performance native XML database for enhanced functionality, significantly higher performance than RDBs, and simpler administration and deployment. Mediaflux XODB supports typical database capabilities such as transactions, on-line backup etc. Mediaflux XODB provides even greater flexibility whilst enabling the system to scale beyond 10⁹ assets.

Mediaflux can inter-operate with any database.

Data Storage

Data is stored in a content store, which can be can one or more of:

• The same database as the metadata (zero administration)
• A specified file-system - Windows UNC paths supported
• A hierarchical file-system.

The types of content stores can be easily extended.

Network Requirements

Although network bandwidth requirements depend on the amount of data exchanged between a Mediaflux client and server, Mediaflux provides XML compression for lower bandwidth connections. For example, there are some applications that connect to a Mediaflux server via a mobile telephone network and satellite phone.

Mediaflux supports raw TCP/IP, HTTP and HTTPS. Typically, all network traffic is tunnelled via HTTP or encrypted HTTPS to allow Mediaflux applications to operate through most firewalls.

File Formats

Any file format can be ingested and stored.

Geospatial file formats with supported metadata extraction include:

• NITF, CIB, MrSID, DTED, LIDAR, CADRG and ERDAS IMG, JPG2000, TIFF, GeoJPG, GeoPDF.

Other file formats with supported metadata extraction include:

• HDF, NetCDF, DICOM, BMP, GIF, JP2, JPEG, PCX, PNG, TIFF, DOC, DOCX, PDF, (DPX).

Thumbnails are generated for image formats and PDF.

Content indexing is supported for text, DOCX, PDF, XML files.

The following can be displayed in the Mediaflux asset viewer:

• Video video/mpeg, video/quicktime, video/mp4, video/x-msvideo
• Audio audio/wav, audio/x-aiff, audio/mp4, audio/amr, audio/mpeg
• Any file type supported by the browser, e.g. pdf
• Local and remote applications can also be launched.

Approximately 150 MIME types are recognised.

Note: Supported file formats can be readily extended.

You are here: Home / Products & Services / Mediaflux / Downloads

For further detailed information about the various components that comprise the Mediaflux software suite the following Downloads are available.

Datasheets

1.2 MB	XODB Datasheet Overview of Mediaflux XODB high performance database.
1.6 MB	Mediaflux Datasheet Overview of Mediaflux Data Management Platform
2.1 MB	Arcitecta Desktop Datasheet Overview of Arcitecta Desktop

Partner Documents

350.6 KB	SGI LiveArc Datasheet SGI offers Mediaflux as SGI LiveArc. The datasheet describes its capabilities. References: SGI
1.9 MB	LiveArc QCMG Case Study The University of Queensland's Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB) is internationally recognised as a leading center for molecular bioscience research. SGI created a solution to provide automated handling and storage of data through each step of QCMG's process workflow. References: SGI

Customer Documents

1.5 MB	TPAC Translation Poster The Tasmanian Partnership for Advanced Computing (TPAC) has established a library of oceanographic and climate datasets which may be translated and downloaded by researchers.
303.5 KB	QUT eResearch Poster The Queensland University of Technology (QUT) has extended the Mediaflux based Research Data Repository to upload metadata describing QUT research datasets to the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) Collections registry.

Newsletters

766.7 KB	Arcitecta Newsletter July 2011 All the news from July 2011.
1.7 MB	Arcitecta Newsletter November 2011 All the news from November 2011.

You are here: Home / Products & Services / Mediaflux / Where to Buy

Mediaflux may be purchased from Arcitecta or from SGI, our global reseller. SGI markets Mediaflux under the LiveArc™ banner.

Arcitecta contact details

telephone: +61 3 8683 8523 email: sales@arcitecta.com

SGI information and contact details

More information relating to SGI and Mediaflux can be found at the following locations SGI: http://www.sgi.com LiveArc: http://sgi.com/products/storage/software/livearc Contact SGI: http://www.sgi.com/sales/askarep.html

Mediaflux is a trademark of Arcitecta Pty Ltd in Australia. LiveArc is a trademark of SGI.