home > about >

Projects Using OGSA-DAI

This page lists the projects that we know about which are using or planning to use or have used OGSA-DAI. If you are planning to or are using OGSA-DAI then we would love to know about it. Please email with the name of your project and a brief description of what the aims are and how OGSA-DAI fits into it.

AstroGrid	AstroGrid-D	BIoDA	Biogrid	BioSimGrid	Bridges
caGrid	COBrA-CT	Data Mining Grid	DEISA	D-Grid	eDiaMoND
ePCRN	ESSE	FirstDIG	GEDDM	GEESE	GeneGrid
GEODE	GEON	GridMiner	HOC-SA	IBM OGSA-DAI Database Replication	InteliGrid
INWA	ISPIDER	IU RGRbench	LEAD	MCS	^myGrid
NanoCMOS	N2Grid	@neurIST	OntoGrid	ODD-Genes	OGSA-WebDB
Provenance	RUPAGATION	SIMDAT	Secure Data Grid	SPIDR	UNIDART
ViroLab	VOTES	?	?	?	?

Project Descriptions

Click on a project name to visit the projects website.

AstroGrid

AstroGrid is a UK project to build an infrastructure for the Virtual Observatory (VObs). The VObs is emerging as a network of web services and may use OGSI services for some tasks. AstroGrid is using OGSA-DAI to build the prototype of a grid data warehouse in which large data extracts from many data centres can be combined for easier analysis. Last Updated: 24/11/03.

AstroGrid-D

AstroGrid-D is the community project for astronomy within the German D-Grid Initiative. Astronomers and computer scientists from several institutes have joined forces in an interdisciplinary partnership to address one of the most important challenges of e-science: the analysis of huge volumes of scientific data and enabling scientists to share scientific interests, data, and research results.

Many AstroGrid-D use cases either require access to data archives or extracted information from simulations stored in databases. For example, Clusterfinder uses OGSA-DAI to extract data from ROSAT and SDSS in order to create likelihood maps for galaxy clusters. The working group "Distributed Database Access and Data Stream Management" provides tools for efficient, distributed processing of data residing in databases or originating from sensors and other instruments as continuous streams.

We decided to use OGSA-DAI to access databases as it is well-integrated with Globus Toolkit, the Grid middleware of our choice. Moreover, OGSA-DAI offers other important features for Grid users: Hiding some of the complexity of connecting to databases, allowing the databases to stay behind institutional firewalls, and the integration with certificate-based authentication and authorization.

Last Updated: 20/07/07.

BIoDA

BioDA is a one year project funded by BBSRC to evaluate the application of OGSA-DAI in bioinformatic projects. Due to the timing of the BBSRC funded pilot projects little use has been made in them of the OGSA-DAI software. BioDA will investigate how OGSA-DAI could be deployed in two current BBSRC eScience projects and to evaluate their existing data access methods against an OGSA-DAI based approach. Findings from the study will be disseminated in a technical report and a workshop on OGSA-DAI for the bioinformatics community. Last Updated: 28/09/05.

Biogrid Project

The Biogrid project has been initiated to construct a Supercomputer Network, part of IT-program of Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. Under this project, Osaka University and other relevent institutions are in the process of developing a Computer Grid Technology to meet IT needs specialized in biology and medical science. Especially, the DataGrid group in the Biogrid project has developed a system for the federation of bio-related databases with Globus Toolkit 3.0.2/OGSA-DAI, aiming at an application to Drug Discovery. The system has currently bridged 11 databases in heterogeneous communities; such as biology, medical science and pharmaceutics. Last Updated: 25/11/03.

BioSimGrid

The overall aim of this e-science pilot project is to exploit the developing e-science infrastructure and expertise in the UK to enable large scale analysis of the results of biomolecular simulations. In particular the project will establish generic procedures for comparative analysis of simulations of biomolecules of pharmaceutical interest. We also wish to integrate simulation data with those emerging from post-genomic approaches to structural biology.

To address the challenges of distributed computing on large amounts of simulation data (60 billion of records in over 2 TB storage for 1000 trajectories), the BioSimGrid project is building an open software framework system based on OGSA (Open Grid Service Architecture) and OGSA- DAI (Open Grid Service Architecture Data Access and Integration).

The system has a service-oriented computing model using Grid-based Web service technology to deliver data analysis and data mining services to the biomolecular simulation and structural biology communities. Therefore, the associated applications can be developed independently as distributed services and integrated into the system as well as using off-the-shelf middleware components. To address the security problem of the heterogeneous BioSimGrid environment, a Grid certificate-based authentication mechanism (OpenCA) will be integrated across the system. Furthermore, a distributed authorization and accounting mechanism is proposed as part of the system to enhance the security.

This project is funded by BBSRC and DTI. Last Updated: 26/11/03.

BRIDGES: Biomedical Research Informatics Delivered by Grid Enabled Services

BRIDGES will incrementally develop and explore database integration over six geographically distributed research sites within the framework of the large Wellcome Trust biomedical research project Cardiovascular Functional Genomics. Three classes of integration will be developed to support a sophisticated bioinformatics infrastructure supporting: data sources (both public and project generated), bioinformatics analysis and visualisation tools, and research activities combining shared and private data. The inclusion of patient records and animal experiment data means that privacy and access control are particular concerns. An exploration of index factories accelerating sequence processing will test the hypothesis that the Grid makes a new class of e-Science indexes feasible. Both OGSA-DAI and IBM DiscoveryLink technology will be employed and a report will identify how each performed in this context. Last Updated:26/11/03.

cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid

The cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid, or caBIG, is a voluntary network or grid connecting individuals and institutions to enable the sharing of data and tools, creating a World Wide Web of cancer research. The goal is to speed the delivery of innovative approaches for the prevention and treatment of cancer. The infrastructure and tools created by caBIG also have broad utility outside the cancer community. caBIG is being organized under the leadership of the National Cancer Institute's Center for Bioinformatics. The caBIG effort will be utilizing the OGSA-DAI framework in order to help create a strongly typed biomedical informatics data grid. This data grid has been dubbed 'caGrid' and will help to expose existing and new data sets as grid data resources. caGrid is expected to enable the building of an open, multi-institutional data sharing, annotation, and analysis environment. Last Updated: 21/01/05.

COBrA-CT

COBrA-CT is an e-Science project supported by the BBSRC that provides ontology editing and version management tools for bio-ontologies. The ontology editor is based on COBrA (www.xspan.org) and has been implemented as a Protégé plug-in (protege.stanford.edu). The client tools interact with an ontology management server using Grid services to provide management of ontology versions and collaborative ontology development.

OGSA-DAI is currently used in COBrA-CT to access an XML database which stores ontology data in the semantic web formats XML, RDF and OWL. Since OGSA-DAI supports rich XML languages, it appears very efficient and convenient to use OGSA-DAI to build up ontology Grid applications.

Last Updated: 17/07/06.

Data Mining Grid

Future and emerging complex problem-solving environments are characterised by increasing amounts of digital data and rising demands for coordinated resource sharing across geographically dispersed sites. Next generation grid technologies are promising to provide the necessary infrastructure facilitating seamless sharing of computing resources in complex problem-solving environments. Currently, there exists no coherent framework for developing and deploying data mining applications on the grid. The DataMiningGrid project will address this gap by developing generic and sector-independent data mining tools and services for the grid. Last Updated: 07/03/05.

DEISA

DEISA (www.deisa.eu) is a consortium of leading national supercomputing centres that deploys and operates a persistent, production quality, distributed supercomputing environment with continental scope. One of the DEISA activity groups is investigating technologies that support uniform, grid-enabled access to external databases, regardless of their form or location. OGSA-DAI is one of the technologies that is being evaluated as part of this investigation, primarily because of its support for a wide range of database technologies and because of its platform-agnostic implementation. Last Updated: 09/07/07.

D-Grid

Since September 2005 five Community projects and the D-Grid Integrations project (DGI) started within the D-Grid Consortium to build a sustainable Grid infrastructure in Germany. This infrastructure will help to establish the methods of e-science in the German scientific community. The community projects will develop together with the integration project a general and sustainable Grid-infrastructure.

The D-Grid initiative aims to establish and support user specific "community projects" to extent the number of Grid end-users, but at the same time the D-Grid initiative is aware of the need of an underlying standardized Grid foundation. The establishment of this Grid foundation is the scientific goal of the DGI. This Grid foundation infrastructure is the basic requirement for a sustainable development of Grid and e-Science methods in Germany. The synergistic and coherent usage of the infrastructure by many different scientific communities will be initiated.

The Technical University Dresden (TUD) Germany, is also participating in the D-grid initiative and is responsible for installing and maintaining the necessary infrastructure for providing access to various types of data resources.We have chosen Globus Toolkit 4 and OGSA-DAI WSRF for this purpose.Currently the first phase of the project ie installing a fully functional test system is going on and we have a working installation of OGSA-DAI.We have already provided access to our resources for two participating institutions on testing basis. Also the installation of OGSA-DQP 3 is underway and it is planned to use DQP as the primary query processing tool.

Last Updated: 17/02/06.

eDiaMoND

eDiaMoND is a Grid for X-Ray Mammography. The mammograms stored by eDiaMoND are large binary objects (typically 32Mb each) and are held in a Content Management system. Patient data and image data are stored in a corresponding relational database. OGSA-DAI services are used to abstract both of these data resources. In order to achieve this the project is extending OGSA-DAI to include a wrapper for IBM Content Manager.

The architecture for eDiaMoND is built on top of the abstraction layer OGSA-DAI offers. Underneath this layer a number of options for virtualizing the mammography data will be explored: OGSA-DAI has support for data replication and distributed query processing. Alternatively OGSA-DAI can wrap data resources that are federated or replicated through the underlying data management systems. The performance and scalability characteristics of these options can be assessed and matched to the data flow requirements of different application scenarios. Peer to peer, hierarchical and hub and spoke models of breast screening clinics can be explored. The common feature in all cases is the abstraction of mammography data as an OGSA-DAI data resource in a Grid. Last Updated:03/12/03.

ePCRN: electonic Primary Care Research Network

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are a fundamental tool for discovery. Primary care physicians, however, have not traditionally participated in RCTs, even though they are rich sources of patients and data. Difficulty identifying subjects, lack of infrastructure for delivery of complex interventions, privacy, confidentiality, and human subject's protections have all been contributing issues. However, emerging technologies can now overcome many of these obstacles. The introduction of open-source technology using high speed networking allows greater functionality, security, and communication, and permits the integration of PCPs and their practice populations into the clinical research enterprise.

The MAFP Research Network, in cooperation with FPBRN, UMN, AAFP, UBirmingham, UK and ten US based PBRNs are working to build a state-of-the-art electronic infrastructure that supports performance of RCTs in primary care practices, aids in identification of subjects, and promotes rapid integration of new research into practice. The architecture is being introduced to over 6500 PCPs from 2,700 practices serving approximately 16 million patients. Our infrastructure is based on Grid and Web service technology such as OGSA and WSRF for discovery, transport, and security. In particular, we have designed a federated distributed query service using the OGSA-DAI data service model. Through OGSA-DAI and related Grid technologies, clinics can link datasets through "gateways" located within a practice, have access to highly secure data transfer, or participate in real-time video conferencing with PBRN members across the country. The electronic network additionally supports translational research, and is developing capability for RCT patient eligibility searches across wide geographic areas. The development of a high-speed electronic research network using Grid technology may form the foundation for a revolution in clinical research and in primary care in the United States.

Last Updated: 19/07/06.

First Data Investigation on the Grid - FirstDIG

The FirstDIG project was a collaboration between First PLC, the passenger transport company, and the National e-Science Centre represented by EPCC. The project envolved the deployment of OGSA-DAI services within the First South Yorkshire bus operational environment. These services were used to access heterogeneous databases within the organisation. This deployment allowed specific business questions posed by First plc to be answered through a short data mining analysis of the OGSA-DAI service-enabled data sources. The project succesfully demonstrated the deployment and utilisation of OGSA-DAI services in a commercial environment. Last Updated:17/02/04.

GEDDM (Grid Enabled Distributed Data Mining) Project

GEDDM has defined a Common Semantic Model (CSM) to assist with the representation and conversion of data from various sources. This model will facilitate the conversion of data residing in various Flat File Format (FFF) structures, including email, PDF, web log and various database dump formats into a common format for subsequent data mining operations. The project exposes such CSM based conversion capabilities via a suite of Grid Services called Data Conversion Services (DCS).

The DCS is implemented under an OGSA-DAI Grid based framework to provide access to and conversion of unstructured flat files. OGSA-DAI's existing support for flat file access is utilised and a new activity is defined to provide functionality for conversion of these flat files to a common out format. Last Updated: 01/10/04.

GEESE

GEESE (Grid Enabling EDINA SErvices) is an exploratory project looking at how to expose services hosted by EDINA (a UK National Data Centre) to the Grid. The project will investigate exposure of multimedia and bibliographic services along with geospatial resources. Last Updated: 22/03/07.

GeneGrid Project

The GeneGrid project proposes to exploit Grid, existing micro array and sequencing technologies and the large volumes of data generated through screening services that will develop specialist tissue specific datasets relevant to the particular type of disease being studied. The advantage of doing this is that all the genes that relate to a disease can be studied insilco. This will be enabled by the creation of a Grid-based framework that will integrate the generation and analysis of cancer and infectious disease specific genetic information from various distributed international sources, public domain data sets and other unique data generaged by e-Science projects.

One of the big areas of this project will be data integration, and that is something that we are looking to use OGSA-DAI for. OGSA-DAI allows us to easily integrate the likes of workflow definitions and configuration data. However, GeneGrid will require integration of a lot of Flat File Format databases which OGSA-DAI does not support yet, which is a big drawback. Currently examining the potential of expanding the functionality to incorporate flat file format databases support specific to our needs in GeneGrid. Last Updated: 22/04/04.

GEODE (Grid Enabled Occupational Data Environment)

The GEODE project is an application-led study into the management of 'occupational information resources' in the social sciences, through the use of eScience technologies. The project is funded 2005-7 under the ESRC's scheme of 'Small Grants in eSocial Science', administered by NCeSS [www.ncess.ac.uk]. The project focuses upon providing user-friendly facilities to allow social scientists to access, and make linkages between, different types of occupational data. Its main provision involves supporting a 'portal' to an occupational data index service, through which social scientists may pick out the relevant occupational information resources required for their activities, without having need to undertake the extended data management operations which are required under existing models in the field. The project also caters to the suppliers of occupational information resources, by providing a data 'depository' organised as an international virtual organisation. OGSA-DAI is used in the GEODE project to provide the mechanisms for managing a considerable diversity of occupational data resources, some of which are also subject to security restrictions. Last Updated: 20/02/06.

GEON (CYBERINFRASTRUCTURE FOR THE GEOSCIENCES)

GEON IT research focuses on modeling, indexing, semantic mediation, and visualization of multi-scale 4D data, and creation of a prototype GEONgrid, to provide the geoscience community an IT head start in facing the research challenges posed by understanding the complex dynamics of Earth systems. An important contribution will be embarking on the definition of a Unified Geosciences Language System (UGLS), to enable semantic interoperability. The GEONgrid leverages experience gained in the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI) program, and the TeraGrid Distributed Terascale Facility. We will create a portal to provide access to the GEON environment, which will include advanced query interfaces to distributed, semantically-integrated databases, Web-enabled access to shared tools, and seamless access to distributed computational, storage, and visualization resources and data archives.

OGSA-DAI is part of the GEON systems software stack and will be deployed on all the GEON nodes. OGSA-DAI is currently being used to access data from databases running on remote GEON nodes. We are also in the process of evaluating the performance of OGSA-DAI and determine how it fits in the overall GEON architecture. Last Updated: 03/12/03.

GridMiner

The GridMiner project, as the first Grid research effort, addresses all phases of knowledge discovery in databases and other large data sets integrated into the Grid and implements them as an advanced service-oriented Grid infrastructure. The project focuses its effort on data mining and On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP), two complementary technologies, which, if applied in conjunction, provide highly efficient and powerful data analysis and knowledge discovery solutions on the Grid. The GridMiner system includes a set of OGSA conformous services with well-defined interfaces, that are used as needed to assemble applications on top of them. For data accessing and integration a Grid Data Mediation Service is used which provides a single virtual data source with a global schema for the user. The developed concepts have been implemented by re-using the OGSA-DAI Grid Data Service as a framework to show their feasibility. This contribution is enabling access to more than one data source over a global schema with a subset of SQL and integrating the results in a standardized way. The technology developed is being validated and tested on an advanced medical application addressing treatment of traumatic brain injury victims. Last Updated: 11/08/04.

Higher-Order Component - Service Architecture (HOC-SA)

The Higher-Order Component - Service Architecture (HOC-SA) is a Globus incubtor project available from: http://dev.globus.org/wiki/Incubator/HOC-SA.

The aim of HOC-SA is simplifying the development of grid applications. Using the HOC-SA, recurring patterns of parallel behavior can be implemented as Higher-Order Components (HOCs). HOCs are components that take, besides data, executable code as parameters. Code parameters are used to specify the problem-specific steps in a HOC application. HOCs are hosted on top of Globus and are made accessible via Web services. When the HOC-SA is used, programmers do not have to deal with Globus themselves but only select an appropriate HOC for their application and upload the problem-specific code to it. OGSA-DAI is used by the HOC-SA to maintain the uploaded code pieces in a server-site database.

Last Updated: 05/06/07.

IBM OGSA-DAI Database Replication

This IBM funded project aims to combine OGSA-DAI technology with the IBM DB2 data replication application to provide a grid service interface for managing database replication. Grid-enabling database replication in this way will support more scalable and secure data replication across heterogeneous resources and multiple administrative domains.

The resulting combined application will differ from the way that OGSA-DAI is commonly used currently, mainly as a piece of grid middleware used to access data resources. This project presents an opportunity to extend OGSA-DAI to provide it with more powerful capabilities. We will develop OGSA-DAI activities to control the replication data flow between data resources and investigate a common interface for managing relational database replication. We will explore what metadata is required to make best use of such replicated data. The outcome of the project will be a research report and some prototype software.

Last Updated: 17/07/06.

InteliGrid

The goal of InteliGrid project is to provide a grid-based integration and interoperability infrastructure to complex industries such as construction, automotive and aerospace. Our vision of future engineering is a flexible, secure, robust, ambient accessible, interoperable, pay-per demand access to information, communication and processing resources. In many business sectors in general, the ability to securely access diverse data sources in a collaborative multi-institutional environment, called often networked Virtual Organization (VO), is becoming an essential requirement for optimizing the design and development phase of the product lifecycle. Dynamic and secure transparent data access as well as integration of heterogeneous data sources is a key issue in many collaboration environments today. With the increasing pressure of reducing costs and time-to-market in industry and research, end-users have turned their focus to secure data access and dynamic collaboration access control to provide the answer for this requirement.

In order to offer a framework that facilitates the coordination and cooperation between virtually partnering research laboratories or AEC companies InteliGrid has successfully adopted OGSA-DAI middleware framework together with important security enhancements. OGSA-DAI has been exploited as a generic high-level grid middleware offering frequently used capabilities such as data federation and distributed query processing. Unfortunatelly, one of the common problems in VOs is the lack of a definition of internal (authorization), external (authentication) dependencies for data access. The next challenge is that such cross-organizational policies are typically beyond the normal expressive power of security assertions used to represent policies in any of the individual organizations participating in the VO. Moreover, an additional frequent requirement is that each organizational security domain within the VO should retain full control over who, when and how can access data resources. Therefore, to fulfill the mentioned requirements, InteliGrid has been integrating OGSA-DAI services and underlying heterogonous data resources with Grid Authorization Service (GAS) which acts as a trusted centralized logical point for defining and enforcing VO data access and control policies. Due to the fact that GAS is considered as an independent security component of specific technologies used at lower layers it should be fully useable in different VO environments based on OGSA-DAI as well as Globus or other typical grid middleware toolkits.

Last Updated: 16/03/06.

INWA - Informing Business & Regional Policy: Grid-enabled fusion of global data and local knowledge

The INWA project is using existing Grid technologies (including OGSA-DAI) to allow researchers to analyse commercial data located at sites in the UK and Australia. The project is funded by the UK Economic & Social Reseach Council (ESRC) under the pilot projects in e-Social Science Programme. Last Updated: 24/03/04.

ISPIDER

The aim of this Bioinformatics and E-Science funded project is to create an informatics platform for proteomics using Grid-based technologies, and to use this to address specific biological problems. To this end the project will construct an In Silico Proteome Integrated Data Environment Resource (ISPIDER) as a proteome Grid.

The project aims to develop tools, standards and infrastructure that will integrate proteomic data to enable novel queries and analyses to be performed. The infrastructure will use existing technologies developed by other research projects. These include the AutoMed data integration toolkit and Grid middleware developed for the OGSA-DAI and the myGrid projects, such as the OGSA-DQP distributed query processor and the Taverna workflow environment.

We believe that the proposed pilot data integration project, involving 3 major centres of bioinformatics innovation in the UK (Manchester, UCL/Birkbeck, EBI), will also foster greater links and co-operation in UK bioinformatics, and will lead to improved data standards, data integration and associated tools that will benefit the wider biological community. Last Updated: 04/10/05.

IU RGRbench

IU RGRbench (Indiana University Relational Grid Resources bench) is a grid information services benchmark/workload used to better understand resource information management in grid information servers. OGSA-DAI is a data access and integration framework, built to the OGSA standard, for grid services-based access to databases. In the spirit of conjunction with the UK e-Science OGSA-DAI group, we have undertaken a couple collaborative efforts:

Evaluation of OGSA-DAI v2.0 using IU RGRbench.
Portal interface to OGSA-DAI.

Last Updated: 03/12/03.

Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery (LEAD)

LEAD is a US National Science Foundation Large Information Technology Research (ITR) project that is creating scalable, adaptive cyberinfrastructure for mesoscale meteorology research and education. Simply put, LEAD is developing the information technology necessary for people and atmospheric tools to interact with the weather. LEAD is using OGSA-DAI in support of our data subsystem's metadata catalog, myLead, which is being developed by Beth Plale at Indiana University. Last Updated: 07/01/05.

MCS

MCS is a metadata catalog service for data intensive applications. It allows users to publish metadata about data objects and discover those data objects based on the metadata attributes. Users can associate metadata attributes with logical object names. The type of objects that we support are items, collections and views. It can be used along with Replica Location Service (RLS) for dataset publication and discovery on the Grid.

We have implemented a new version of MCS by extending the activities of the grid data service. This version of MCS uses OGSA-DAI as the middleware. The MCS home page exists at http://www.isi.edu/~deelman/MCS. The details of the this particular version of MCS are available at http://gaul.isi.edu/mcs/v3. Last Updated: 23/03/04.

^myGrid

^myGrid is a research project that has extended the Grid framework of distributed computing, producing a virtual laboratory workbench that will serve the life sciences community. The integration environment supports various patterns of scientific investigation.

Scientists will have the ability to customize the work environment to reflect their preferences for resource selection, data management and process enactment. ^myGrid's applicability to the bioinformatics community will be tested through use cases our academic and industry partners develop. Minimally, the environment will be able to support activities relating to the analysis of functional genomic data and the annotation of pattern databases.

^myGrid has developed an integrated environment for orchestrating requests over networked services, and for supporting e-Scientists in making best use of these services and in managing analysis results. All personal, organizational and experimental data (including provenance) in ^myGrid are stored in a central repository known as the ^myGrid Information Repository (mIR). The mIR is based on the ^myGrid Information Model which defines the basic concepts through which different aspects of an e-Science process can be represented and linked. The IM encompasses the following areas:

The design of e-science experiments
The people and organisations that run them
The biological and provenance results from experiments
The computational operations involved in the experiments

The mIR provides a service-oriented interface to the underlying data store which is used by the other components to add/delete/update entities to and from the store. Apart from this service, the data store is exposed to the clients through a Generic Query Interface. The mIR Generic Query Service uses the OGSA-DAI WS-I Tech Preview version to wrap the data store. The original OGSA-DAI WS-I package has been modified slightly to conform with the ^myGrid package structure and build process, and the coupling with OMII has been removed by adding a property file which is used during the build process. A separate client-side library for this service is built using Axis-1.2RC3 libraries to allow the other ^myGrid components (all of which are based on the newer Axis) interact with the mIR.

OGSA-DQP has been developed jointly by the ^myGrid and OGSA-DAI projects, complements the ^myGrid workflow engine, Taverna, in enabling declarative queries to be expressed over networked data access and computational services. The

^myGrid components do not support direct interaction with Grid sevices, and hence we have implemented a general purpose (generic) web service wrapper around the GDQS. This will enable the users to call the OGSA-DQP as part of a scientific experiment either by embedding it into a workflow (^myGrid WF enactment engine cannot directly call a Grid service) or by using it as a declarative alternative to what a WF Enactment Engine does. Last Updated: 17/05/05.

NanoCMOS

The NanoCMOS project is funded by EPSRC in collaboration with leading electronics design houses, chip manufacturers and ECAD vendors to the tune of £5.3M ($9.1M). It will apply e-Science and grid technology to tackle some of the fundamental challenges facing nano-CMOS design. The era of "happy scaling" is over for semiconductor design, as variability in device characteristics is increasing markedly as the size of transistors on the chip continues to drop. This demands revolutionary changes in the way that integrated circuits and systems are designed.

The NanoCMOS project is using grid technology to establish strong links between circuit designers, system designers and chip fabricators. Simulations at every level will be linked to allow circuits and systems to accommodate the individual behaviour of every transistor on a chip. The project is using OGSA-DAI to manage the metadata that describes all these simulations and to make the results at one site available securely to other sites in the consortium. Last Updated: 24/08/07.

N2Grid

The focus of the project is the evelopment of N2Grid, a neural network environment based on the Grid.

Our approach employs the upcoming infrastructure of the Grid as a transparent environment to allow users the exchange of information (neural network objects, neural network paradigms) and exploit the available computing resources for neural network specific tasks leading to a Grid based, world-wide distributed, neural network simulation system.

It implements a highly sophisticated connectionist problem solution environment within a Knowledge Grid.

Our system uses only standard protocols and services in a service oriented architecture, aiming for a wide dissemination of this Grid application. The N2Grid system is based on the common middleware Globus, with Java CoG and some extensions of Globus by the DataGrid project and the Open Grid Services Architecture Data Access and Integration (OGSADAI) project.

N2Grid is an evolution of the existing NeuroWeb system. The idea of these system was, to see all components of an artificial neural network as data objects in a database. Now we go ahead and see them as parts of the arising world wide Grid infrastructure. Last Updated: 13/02/04.

@neurIST

@neurIST (www.aneurist.org) is an Information Society Technologies (IST) Integrated Project funded within the European Commission's (EC) Sixth Framework Programme. The vision of the project is to develop and deploy applications that improve the quality of clinical care and accelerate the development of new treatments. The data service infrastructure @neuInfo comprises tools for constructing virtual data sources that enable transparent access to distributed heterogeneous biological and clinical data sources. Virtualization of data sources through Grid services leverages state of the art Grid technologies and will be extended towards semantic, ontology-based systems, which are key to the integration of multi-level (from molecular to population) health related data. OGSA-DAI is currently used as common interface for the various data sources and providing the base for future needed custom functionality at data service side. Last Updated: 30/10/06.

ODD-Genes

ODD-Genes demonstrates the power of OGSA-DAI in enabling researchers in genetics to perform new kinds of data analysis, greatly enhancing their ability to understand the wealth of data in post-genomic bioinformatics. Last Updated: 24/11/03.

OGSA-WebDB

OGSA-WebDB has been developed to bring existing web database resources (webdbs) into the Grid. It extends the OGSA-DAI architecture by providing new activities for accessing webdbs. As users can query webdbs with SQL, it is possible to integrate internet webdbs with local Grid databases. Detailed information and software can be found at http://dbgrid.org. Last Updated: 03/08/06.

OntoGrid: Semantic Grid Services Evolution Pattern

The provision of semantics in the Grid in a principled manner has been the focus of the S-OGSA architecture [1]. One aspect of S-OGSA is the evolutionary reworking of existing Grid services to become semantically aware. Since there is a plethora of ways to approach this problem, we suggest a best practices pattern with concrete code examples using the Ontokit toolkit developed by the Ontogrid consortium. OGSA-DAI is discussed in this pattern as an example of a Grid service that has been extended to deal with semantics. We present the notion of Semantic Bindings (SBs) in the context of Grid databases and discuss how OGSA-DAI can be extended to deal with ontology based queries.

Corcho, O. Alper, P. Kotsiopoulos, I, Missier P, Bechhofer, S. and Goble C. An overview of S-OGSA: a Reference Semantic Grid Architecture. Journal of Web Semantics.

Last Updated: 10/07/06.

Provenance

Provenance is an EU Community Sixth Framework funded project to design, conceive and implement an open provenance architecture for grid systems. This will allow information generated and managed within a grid infrastructure to be proven and trusted. In this way the information's history, including the processes that created and modified it, are documented in a way that can be inspected, validated and reasoned about by authorised users that need to ensure information controls have not been altered, abused or tampered with.

The use of OGSA-DAI is to abstract the database access from the core Provenance Service implementation. As such OGSA-DAI owns the connection to the database. This allows the Provenance Service implementation to focus on the key business functionality rather than database specific issues. Last Updated:15/03/06.

RUPAGATION

RUPAGATION (Replica UPdate propAGATION) is a project aiming at integrating the data replication and replica content synchronization functionality into the OGSA-DAI middleware. The goal is to provide increased availability and fault-tolerance of the data resources by means of the replication, while keeping the data consistent across distinct replicas.

RUPAGATION is implemented as a set of modules, pluggable into OGSA-DAI service, which can catch and log incoming update statements, propagate them from primary replica to secondary replicas and apply update sets on the replicated data resources.

Replica synchronization strategies are implemented as stand alone modules, interfacing RUPAGATION, and are data resource independent, which means that the same implementation of a replica synchronization strategy can be used to synchronize relational resources replicas as well as XML databases and file replicas.

RUPAGATION has been integrated with several legacy grid services (MCS, CAS), turning the legacy services into distributed applications with consistent replicated data among deployed instances.

OGSA-DAI middleware provides RUPAGATION system with the support for heterogeneous data resources, virtualization of data resources and Web Service based access to the data resources.

Last Updated: 07/03/07.

Secure Data Grid

In this project, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) mechanisms are designed and implemented for data grids. We have developed a method to enhance the existing security infrastructure of OGSA-DAI by incorporating the Community Authorization Service (CAS) provided by the Globus Toolkit. Existing OGSA-DAI Grid Data Service and the role-map file are also modified. Our access control method provides increased manageability for a large number of users and reduces day-to-day administration tasks of the resource providers, while they maintain ultimate authority over their resources. Performance analysis shows that our method adds very little overhead to the existing security infrastructure of OGSA-DAI. Last Updated: 26/08/05.

SIMDAT

SIMDAT is a European Commission Sixth Framework Programme project producing Data Grids for Process and Product Development using Numerical Simulation and Knowledge Discovery. The ambitious objectives of SIMDAT are to accelerate the uptake of existing Grid techniques and architectures in a variety of industries and services, provide standardised solutions for some of the missing capability, and to validate the effectiveness of Grid in simplifying processes used for the solution of complex, data-centric problems. OGSA-DAI is being employed to provide data access and integration capabilities for the Grid infrastructure being created by the project. Last Updated: 30/05/05.

Space Physics Interactive Data Resource (SPIDR) and Environmental Scenario Search Engine (ESSE)

Space Physics Interactive Data Resource (SPIDR) http://spidr.ngdc.noaa.gov is a network of web-services and portals developed for the ICSU World Data Centers, which has nodes in the US, Russia, Japan, China, Australia, India, and South Africa. Environmental Scenario Search Engine (ESSE) http://esse.wdcb.ru is the next step in the Earth Sciences data integration based on the OGSA-DAI middleware for management and data mining of distributed terabyte-scale archives for climate, space physics and remote sensing. We use a data source grid service abstraction layer to virtualize "sequential databases" providing time series for our search engine. The data source interface is a standard OGSA-DAI activity with a simple XML output schema. Time series selected from the data source in XML format can be mined directly by the search engine or transformed into another format with XSLT to be used by another client, for example by a MS Excel spreadsheet. Our data mining algorithm is an OGSA-DAI activity which takes fuzzy logic expressions to describe the searching environmental events in natural language. Compliance with the OGSA-DAI specification and Java/J# cross-compiled source code allowed us to deploy our data source and mining services into most of the existing web service and grid service containers including Microsoft .NET, Apache Tomcat/Axis, WSRF Globus Toolkit 4, OMII, and EGEE gLite. These projects are developed jointly by the National Geophysical Data Center, NOAA, Geophysical Center of Russian Academy of Sciences, and Microsoft Research Cambridge.

We have two OGSA-DAI related publications:

a Microsoft Research Technical Report, will be published on the MSR web site on August 15th.
a paper accepted for Data Management in Grid Workshop at VLDB meeting in Seoul in September, titled "Integrating and mining distributed environmental archives on Grids", by Mikhail Zhizhin, Eric Kihn, Rob Redmon, Alexei Poyda, Dmitry Mishin, Dmitry Medvedev, Vassily Lyutsarev. The link to DMG workshop is http://liris.cnrs.fr/~jpierson/DMG_VLDB06/.

Last Updated: 02/08/06.

UNIDART

The Uniform Data Request Interface Programme, UNIDART, is a EUMETNET Programme. It is aimed at the development of uniform services to access meteorological data and products. Further, a Web interface is implemented that allows the interactive use of these services. The interface is integrated in a Web portal where registered users can log on and get access to data stored in the meteorological centres which have installed the UNIDART services. The services are implemented as web services using the OGSA-DAI grid software. Currently the national meteorological centres of the following countries are nodes of the UNIDART Data Grid: Finland, Norway, Germany, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Republic of Korea. These organisations provide a UNIDART service for the access to climate time series.

Last Updated: 24/07/06.

ViroLab

The mission of the ViroLab EU-project (2006-2009) is to provide researchers and medical doctors in Europe with a Virtual Laboratory for Infectious Diseases that facilitates medical knowledge discovery and decision support. To this end a virtual laboratory will be developed enabling easy access to distributed resources as well as sharing, processing and analysing virological, immunological, clinical and experimental data. As a prototype for this virtual laboratory for infectious diseases, the problem of HIV drug resistance will be used. The virtual laboratory will integrate the biomedical information from viruses (proteins and mutations), patients (e.g. viral load) and literature (drug resistance experiments) resulting in a rule-based distributed decision support system for drug ranking. In addition ViroLab will include advanced tools for (bio) statistical analysis, visualization, modelling and simulation, enabling prediction of the temporal virological and immunological response of viruses with complex mutation patterns for drug therapy.

OGSA-DAI is used in ViroLab to provide transparent, consistent and data resource-independent access to different heterogeneous data resources such as clinical, virological and drug databases by hiding their internals and their underlying infrastructure behind a layer of virtualization services. At the same time, it has to be guaranteed that all operations are performed by keeping the privacy and protecting the confidentiality of patients' data.

Last Updated: 18/04/07.

VOTES

The Virtual Organisations for Trials and Epidemiological Studies (VOTES) project has been funded by the Medical Research Countil for 3 years and started in October 2005. It involves the universities of Glasgow, Oxford, Imperial College, Nottingham, Leicester and Manchester. VOTES will investigate the application of Grid technologies to the clinical trials domain. Specifically, the project will focus upon the areas of:

Patient recruitment
Data collection
Study management aspects of clinical trials

The clinical trials domain is a particularly challenging one in that potentially overlapping, dynamically varying, geographically distributed, heterogeneous groups of people, resources and data sets need to come together for given trials. In Grid parlance these are termed virtual organisations (VOs). The VOs for clinical trials have very strict security requirements on the data sets, the resources (DBs etc), who is allowed to see, use them, in what context etc. The main challenges involved in this project will be to federate data from many sources crossing domains that do not necessarily trust each other. The security issues are of great significance due to the inherently sensitive nature of the clinical data involved. Additionally, the issues surrounding data classification will need to be addressed, with implementations of data schemata, meta-data and ontologies to be investigated.

The OGSA-DAI technology is forming the cornerstone of our data access and integration framework with initial prototypes already available. More information on VOTES is available at: www.nesc.ac.uk/hub/projects/votes or through contacing Prof. Richard Sinnott ( ).

Some of the initial VOTES prototypes have been made accessible via Shibboleth technology for the wider community. To test out some of these systems please visit: http://wiki.oucs.ox.ac.uk/esp-grid/NeSC_Shibbolized_Resources.

Last Updated: 07/06/06.