KDDart Platform for Data Integration in Pre-Breeding, Breeding and Ecology

Diversity Arrays Technology Pty Ltd, Building 3 Level D, Kirinari Street, University of Canberra, Bruce ACT 2617, Australia

Diversity Arrays presents KDDart, a new IT infrastructure we developed in conjunction with Australian and international partner and collaborator organisations. The KDDart platform, which is in early stages of deployment and testing within several projects, is a modular platform designed to integrate high data volumes that often originate from various sources.

The core module, which collects field data for plant performance, can easily be ported to collect any kind of phenotypic data from both breeding and natural plant and animal populations. The environmental module can store from high to lower resolution spatio-temporal data, obtained through sensor devices. These devices can be configured to communicate with KDDart remotely or from publicly available GIS/remote sensing data sources. Both phenotypic and environmental modules are connected to molecular data module enabled to store marker data from high volume, high resolution genome profiling technologies (e.g. DArTseq). In addition, the system is capable of storing inventory and pedigree/relatedness information.

KDDart is design as a modern IT infrastructure with 3 major components (layers):

1. Database layer
2. Application layer RESTful API (Data Access Layer or DAL)
3. Client Applications/Software layer

The Application layer API is a heart of the system and is designed as a RESTfull web service which provides and manages access to the KDDart database. DAL is primarily a set of generic methods to perform all possible database operations and is exposed as a web service RESTful API.

Client Applications layer is a collection of scripts, software applets etc. accessing the database through the DAL. These applications can be written as web, desktop or mobile applications using any modern programming language.

Data collected and stored in KDDart is available for statistical analysis or data-mining using KDCompute, which represents KDDart’s generic plug-in platform for batch processing. Processed data/information can be viewed, further analysed and interpreted by project staff and other system users through KDDart's user secure and controlled environment.