The architecture of the MAST system is heavily influences by the concepts of Representational State Transfer (REST), Resource Orientated Architecture (ROA), Service Orientated Architecture (SOA), OpenData and MASHUPS.

• REST is a style of software architecture for distributed systems and is a Web service design model. Key to REST is the existence of resources which are referenced by global identifiers (e.g. an URI in HTTP) and that the set of operations supported by the web service use HTTP methods (e.g., GET, PUT, POST, or DELETE).
• ROA is a specific set of guidelines of a RESTful architecture. It is only applicable to the Web, where published content is regarded as a resource. Specifically, for the purposes of the MAST system, it recommends that applications should expose many URIs, one for each resource. The strategic resources which exist on the Marine Institute servers are never touched; instead various representations of those strategic resources are made available via ERDDAP web services. This is the case with ERDDAP data broker (a web service) that is being accessed by MAST.
• SOA is a set of principles in developing software in the form of interoperable services. These services are business functions that are built as software components that can be reused. Web implementation of SOA (web services) can be implemented using a service based technology, for example CORBA or REST.
• OpenData is the principle that data should freely avaible for everyone to reuse and republish.
• MASHUP, in web development, in web development, is a web page or web application that combines web resources (data, presentation or functionality) from two or more sources to create new services.

While the GUI of the MAST system is a portal, the architecture being used to aggregate and display data is the architecture of the MASHUP. In a traditional portal approaches aggregation by splitting the role of Web server into two phases: HTML markup generation and aggregation of HTML markup fragments. MASHUP uses APIs provided by different content sites to aggregate and reuse content in a different way. The architecture of MAST aligns to that of MASHUPs. MASHUPS are divided into three layers:

• Presentation/user interaction: HTML/XTML, CSS, JavaScript, Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX). MAST is being developed using these technologies via the Visual Studio 2010 ASP.NET development environment.
• Web Services: business functionality can be accessed using the API services. MAST is using REST but other technologies such as SOAP may be used later in the project.
• Data: Technologies being used here are XML, JSON and OGC mapping services.

The data supplied by the Marine Institute are brokered by the Environmental Research Division's Data Access Program (ERDDAP) data broker. This is OpenData and the service is core to the MAST prototype. The broker provides a consistent interface to the data services of the Marine Institute; these services include wave, tide and weather sensors and numerical model output. ERDDAP publishes the data in a number of standard and developer friendly ways, including some Open Geospatial Consortium formats. Communication between MAST and ERDDAP is via Uniform Resource Identifiers.

Figure 1: MAST Service Architecture

Third party data feeds from commercial entities provide live feeds of data that are not currently available from the Marine Institute. The MASHUP of these commercial feeds with the OpenData of the Marine Intitute is a example of the modern paradign of freely combining resources from a number of sources to develop a new resource.

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