Find data offers

The MDS Broker is the data catalogue of the MDS, which displays the data offers provided by the members of the MDS via the Connector. The MDS Broker crawls the connector known to it at regular intervals and displays its data offerings so that an overview of the data offerings can be obtained.

You can access the frontends of the differend MDS-environment Broker of the MDS Test Catalogue or MDS Productive Catalogue and browse all crawled resources. In the frontend you can also search for specific keywords, filter for various categories, change the sorting or switch between the standard tile view and a list view.

For sorting following options are available:

• Most Recent: Default setting. Sorts by date the offers were added to the Broker.
• By Title: Alphabetical sorting of offers by title.
• By Connector: Alphabetical sorting by Connector-Endpoint URL.
• By Popularity: Sorting by most clicked offers. The most clicked offers are at the top.

The following attributes of a data offer are searched through a search via the search-bar: Asset-ID, Asset-Title, Data-Category, Data-Subcategory, Description, Curator-Organisation-Name, Keywords, Connector Endpoint and Participant-ID.

In addition to the data offers, the Broker also displays a status of the connector where the data offer was found. If a connector is displayed as offline it means that these data offers cannot be negotiated at the moment, because the connector behind the data offer is e.g. in maintenance or offline on purpose. After a grace period these data offers will not be displayed anymore. However, if the connector is back online these assets will be displayed again. When determining the status, the Broker refers to its crawling mechanism. If the Broker cannot crawl the connector it knows about for technical reasons e.g. due to the connector being offline, it passes this on as a status to the Broker-UI.

The Broker crawling mechanism works like the catalogue request between two connectors. The Broker, which itself builds upon a connector, queries the catalogs of the him known connectors and displays the data offers found.

Same page as list view:

By clicking on a data offering, you can see more information on the data offering and also see the Connector Endpoint, under which the connector offering the data is available to be contacted from your connector. This connector endpoint can later be used to search the other connector with your own connector and to do contract negotiations for data offers.

The data provider's policies linked to the data offer can also be viewed in the detail view.