Technological projects

The collaboration with the NeOn project is facilitated by the involvement of FAO in this project. The NeOn project is a mixture of application development, advancement of new theoretical models, creation of methodological processes, and case study building. D4Science plans to use the ontologies developed by FAO in the NeON project within the Fisheries Virtual Research Environments (VRE). These ontologies can be used to structure, relate, index and locate data. Ontologies can be used as concept lists for annotating resources in VREs with appropriate keywords. As these keywords are structured in ontologies, they can be used to improve search results by suggesting related resources or categories. The ontologies can also function as browsing mechanisms, enabling users to see the resources that are annotated with the ontological concepts. Moving beyond mere annotation, ontologies can be used as the structural backbone for VRE information objects themselves, defining objects and their relationships to one another, thus greatly enriching the D4Science object model.

The collaboration with ETICS mainly concerns the technological area:

Technology

D4Science uses ETICS services as its build and integration platform. The current ETICS system is the result of two years of continuous refinement, where the collaboration with the DILIGENT (the predecessor of the D4Science project) team was a continuous source of feedback. D4Science has now fully standardized its software engineering process on it.

The D4Science integration and testing activity relies on the ETICS system for most of its tasks. This collaboration involves the different teams working in the preparation of the gCube releases. In particular:

• Developers rely on ETICS to execute local and remote builds of the component they are developing. ETICS is also useful for developers to share among them the different gCube components.
• The Build team exploits the ETICS system in the integration of the different software components provided by developers and builds a common gCube release. ETICS allows the execution of local and remote builds and the definition of different types of builds (continuous builds, integration builds, etc) by creating different configurations for the same component.
• The testing team uses ETICS for the execution of deployment tests and static code analyzers. The local or remote execution of these tests using ETICS facilitates and automatises the tasks of D4Science testers.

D4Science participated to the ETICS session in EGEE'08 (September 2008) by providing feedback about D4Science usage of the system. In particular, the current usage of ETICS for building and testing gCube and gCore was explained. Possible future improvements in ETICS were presented and discussed with the ETICS team.

The common interest among D4Science and Health-e-Child is mainly on technological aspects.

Technology

The D4Science and Health-e-Child projects share the base technology for the information/data processing pipeline, both building on top of the Grid and the OGSA paradigm and the Globus WS-Core framework. Since the beginning of the projects the flow of technology from D4Science to Health-e-Child started with quite concrete artifacts and resulted in rich feedback flowing back from the Health-e-Child implementation teams, which significantly improved the quality and completeness of fundamental gCube components, such as the ResultSet and the search engine. Nowadays, D4Science is closely observing the evolution occurring within Health-e-Child so as to adopt the new significant artifacts developed there, which stem from the special requirements of the Bioinformatics and Medical community served by the project. In this direction it has proved extremely important that the two projects share a common implementation base, since this significantly reduces the costs of materializing the collaboration results. NKUA, a common partner of Health-e-Child and D4Science, is the flow channel of information and technology among the two projects. Regular meetings occur nearly every week not only for exchanging information on each other’s progress, problems and challenges but also for studying fields of common interest for future implementation.

D4Science shares GENESIS-DR’s objectives aiming to provide guaranteed, reliable, easy, effective, and operational access to a variety of Earth Science data sources, for further integration with other types of information (e.g. documentation, other digital objects) needed by the Earth Science and other communities to build dynamic Virtual Research Environments. In this sense, the collaboration between the two projects shall exploit the power of Web Services in general and Web Services Processing (WSP) features of interest for both Grid and Earth Science communities. Note that standards for WSP are being discussed by the OGF (Open Grid Forum) and OGC (Open Geospatial Committee).

Technology

The GENESI-DR infrastructure refers to the open European-wide federation of distributed Earth Science facilities, interconnecting in particular GENESI-DR participating sites and the participating Earth Science Digital Repositories, facilitating transparent access to data and associated GENESI-DR services.

Among available capabilities and ongoing developments that constitute the initial reference infrastructure of GENESI-DR there is the ESA EO Grid on Demand infrastructure1 which integrates high-speed connectivity, distributed processing resources and large volumes of data to provide science and industrial partners with improved access to end products.

D4Science is continuing a close collaboration with the ESA team responsible for the EO Grid infrastructure as initiated with DILIGENT: current activities involve the direct submission of jobs to the ESA Grid infrastructure and the integration of results within the D4Science repository, thus fully exploiting the Grid paradigm behind both projects. D4Science is following a precise roadmap to exploit the foreseen GENESI-DR infrastructure once it becomes available through user services.

Service

The GENESI-DR services are provided to the community to better exploit Earth Science data covering functionalities such as: discovery, access to data, on-demand processing, storage of user results. A major objective of GENESI-DR is to integrate new scientific and technological derived paradigms in operational infrastructures in response to latest Earth Science requirements: one of the preliminary measures to fulfil this objective is to adapt the ESA Grid on-Demand for multiple digital repositories by supporting at least one application based on Grid-on-Demand access to multiple sites.

Through services for the monitoring of land vegetation and ocean chlorophyll, D4Science currently advertises a direct interaction with the ESA EO Grid on Demand Portal which offers access to science-oriented Earth Observation Grid services and applications including access to a number of global geophysical ENVISAT products.

Once ESA EO Grid on Demand Portal user services are adapted to work on multiple digital repositories D4Science can provide the means for a dynamic integration of those repositories providing the communities with a broader view on data access and exploitation; on the other hand D4Science can offer a reliable operational environment for the storage, processing and manipulation of results delivered by those services.

Networking

On various occasions, detailed discussion for effective collaboration between the two projects was performed in meetings such as:

• GRL2020 workshop, March 2008
• 5th e-Infrastructure Concertation Meeting organized by BELIEF II, June 2008
• EGEE User Forum (presentation to a session organized by D4SCIENCE was delivered by GENESI-DR), September 2008