In this paper, we present an overview of the Virtual Data Center (VDC) software, an open-source digital library system for the management and dissemination of distributed collections of quantitative data. (see http://TheData.org). The VDC functionality provides everything necessary to maintain and disseminate an individual collection of research studies, including facilities for the storage, archiving, cataloging, translation, and on-line analysis of a particular collection. Moreover, the system provides extensive support for distributed and federated collections including: location-independent naming of objects, distributed authentication and access control, federated metadata harvesting, remote repository caching, and distributed "virtual" collections of remote objects.
Also see related research.