Zentity is a research output repository platform that provides a suite of building blocks, tools, and services that help you create and maintain your organization’s digital library ecosystem.
With Zentity, researchers can easily access, analyze, and unlock the previously hidden structure and relationships among data elements, as well as extend existing data models by adding additional relationships and properties to these relationships. Zentity is flexible and extensible, taking advantage of the optimizations and performance features that are available from Microsoft SQL Server 2008.
Zentity Introduction Video
Microsoft Research Senior Program Manager Oscar Naim introduces Zentity and demonstrates some of its helpful new features, including the Pivot Viewer and Visual Explorer.
Zentity Overview
Zentity is a repository platform that helps academic, governmental, and scientific organizations conduct and compile research. From a technical standpoint, Zentity is a hybrid store: a combination of a triplestore and a traditional relational database.
Zentity is data agnostic, supporting arbitrary data models, and provides semantically rich functionality that enables the user to find and explore interesting relationships between elements both programmatically—by using the Zentity API—and visually—by using Microsoft Live Lab Pivot Viewer and Microsoft Research Visual Explorer.
About Zentity 2.1
Zentity 2.1 includes a new Resource Manager web user interface that allows users to query the database, review and update records, and create and edit relationships between items that are stored in Zentity. The Resource Manager will work with custom data models and even provides users with the ability to save searches for later use. Zentity 2.1 also offers the option to install a localized Spanish language version of the software.
Zentity incorporates the Pivot Collection Service, which makes it easier to maintain, display, and interact with data in flexible and innovative ways. The Pivot Collection Service works in conjunction with the Pivot Viewer, which is a Microsoft Silverlight control to visualize n-dimensional data sets and the metadata that is associated with them. Zentity also includes the Visual Explorer Silverlight control, which enables researchers to navigate Zentity data visually by using a graph metaphor.
Zentity is built on the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0, which includes features such as OData support, WCF Data Services, and improvements to the Entity Framework. Zentity also uses Microsoft SQL Server 2008, Entity Framework, and LINQ.
Zentity also enables interesting information aggregation scenarios, or mashups, across different data sources, by taking advantage of standard protocols such as the Open Data Protocol (OData).
Additional Features
- Zentity Software Development Kit Includes dynamically created sample data sets from publicly available sources, such as Pub Med, programming examples, and API documentation.
- Zentity Console An application based on PowerShell commandlets that provides easy access to the Zentity API by using a console application.
- Zentity Data Service This service exposes arbitrary data models stored in Zentity to external applications. This service is based on WCF Data Services and it is OData compliant, which allows applications such as Excel Power Pivot to connect to Zentity and enable data mining.
- Improved deployment experience Most users can install Zentity and begin using it within 15 minutes or sooner.
Downloads
Community
Partners
Events
- Open Repositories 2011
Austin, Texas
7–11 June, 2011 - Zentity Workshop
Bogotá, Colombia
25-26 October, 2010
