Microsoft Zentity– helping you manage your digital repositories
Microsoft Zentity is a semantically enabled repository platform that provides a suite of building blocks, tools, and services to create and maintain an organisation’s digital-library ecosystem. The research lifecycle generates a wide variety of outputs that are important to store and track as part of the on-going research process. Zentity maximizes the value of this output by helping researchers access, analyse, and unlock the previously hidden structure and relationships among data elements.
Zentity 2.0 Introduction Video
Microsoft Research Senior Program Manager Oscar Naim introduces Zentity 2.0 and demonstrates some of the great new features, including the Pivot Viewer and Visual Explorer.
About Zentity 2.0
Microsoft Zentity is a repository platform designed for academic, governmental, and scientific organizations that conduct and compile research. From a technical standpoint, Zentity is a hybrid store: a combination of a triplestore and a traditional relational database.
Microsoft Zentity is data agnostic, supporting arbitrary data models, and provides semantically rich functionality that enables the ability 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.
Microsoft 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 Silverlight control to visualize n-dimensional data sets and the metadata associated with them. Zentity also includes the Visual Explorer Silverlight control, which enables researchers to visually navigate Zentity data by using a graph metaphor.
Microsoft 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.
Other features of Zentity include:
- 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 less.
For more information on Microsoft Zentity see https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/a4125c74-36ea-4f23-9278-792de0808e45/