| Friday, May 12 |
| 3:45 pm - 5:15 pm | |
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DILIGENT - Bridging WSRF services and the EGEE middleware
(90 mins)
Pedro Andrade
View Participants
The demand for Digital Libraries (DL) has recently grown considerably, DLs are perceived as a necessary instrument to support communication and collaboration among the members of communities of interest; many application domains require DL services, e.g. e-Health, e-Learning, e-Government, and many of the organizations that demand a DL are small, distributed, and dynamic, because they use the DL to support temporary activities such as courses, exhibitions, projects, etc.
Nowadays the construction and management of a DL requires high investments and specialized personnel because the content production is very expensive and multimedia handling requires high computational resources. The effect are that months are spent in designing and setting up a DL and that the DL systems lack interoperability and the services provided are difficult to reuse. This development model is not suitable to satisfy the demand of many organizations, so the purpose of DILIGENT is to create a Digital Library Infrastructure that will allow members of dynamic virtual research organizations to create on-demand transient digital libraries based on shared computing, storage, multimedia, multi-type content, and application resources. Following this vision Digital libraries are not ends in themselves; rather they are enabling technologies for digital asset management, electronic commerce, electronic publishing, teaching and learning, and other activities.
DILIGENT is a three-year European funded project that aims at developing a test-bed DL infrastructure able to create a multitude of DLs on-demand, manage the resources of a DL (possibly provided by multiple organizations), and operate the DL during its lifetime. These DLs will be active on the same set of shared resources: content sources (i.e. repositories of information searchable and accessible), services (i.e. software tools, that implement a specific functionality and whose descriptions, interfaces and bindings are defined and publicly available) and hosting nodes (i.e. networked entities that offer computing and storage capabilities and supply an environment for hosting content sources and services).
By exploiting appropriate mechanisms provided by the DL infrastructure, organizations are able to register their resources and provide a description of them. The infrastructure manages the registered resources by supporting their discovering, reservation, monitoring and by implementing a number of functionalities that aim at supporting the required controlled sharing and quality of service.
The composition of a DL is dynamic since the services of the infrastructure continuously monitor the status of the DL resources and, if necessary, change the components of the DL in order to offer the best quality of service. By relying on the shared resources many DLs, serving different communities, can be created and modified on-the-fly, without big investments and changes in the organizations that set them up.
The DILIGENT infrastructure is being constructed by implementing a service oriented architecture in a Grid framework. The DILIGENT design will be service oriented in order to provide as many reusable components as possible for other e-applications that could be created on top of the DILIGENT infrastructure. Furthermore, DILIGENT exploits the Grid middleware, gLite, and the Grid production infrastructure released by the Enabling Grid for E-SciencE (EGEE) project. By merging a service-oriented approach with a Grid technology we can exploit the advantages of both. In particular, the Grid provides a framework where a good control of the shared resources is possible. By taking full advantage of the scalable, secure, and reliable Grid infrastructure each DL service will provide an enhanced functionality with respect the equivalent non-Grid-aware service. Moreover, the gLite Grid enables the execution of very computational demanding applications, such as those required to process multimedia content. DILIGENT will enhance existing Grid services with the functionality needed to support the complex services interactions required to build, operate and maintain transient virtual digital libraries.
The session will present how DILIGENT is implementing its DL test-bed, what services are and will be offered, how GT4 is being used, how the EGEE middleware (gLite) is being used, how they are being linked and how the DILIGENT user communities can benefit from this. Since DILIGENT is developing an advanced test-bed that combines a scalable, secure, and reliable Grid infrastructure empowered by gLite with the dynamic usage of services provided by WSRF, a particular emphasis will be given to this interoperability work.
Location: G409
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| | Slides: DILIGENT - Bridging WSRF services and the EGEE middleware |
| | Slides: DILIGENT - DIS and Keeper Services |
| | Slides: DILIGENT - Process Management Services |