[communities] GGF Proposal Submission

[a.krause at epcc.ed.ac.uk]

proposers_name: Amy Krause 
 
affiliation: EPCC 

email: a.krause at epcc.ed.ac.uk 

proposed_title: OGSA-DAI Tutorial 

session_type: Tutorial 

proposed_duration: 2 - 3 hours 

target_audience: Project managers and technical architects looking for technologies to solve data access and integration problems; and developers interested in exposing data resources to the Grid 

num_attendees:  

abstract: OGSA-DAI is a widely used piece of middleware used to access data 
sources within Grids. This tutorial will give a general 
introduction to OGSA-DAI presenting:

	o Data access and integration requirements for Grids.
	o How OGSA-DAI aims to satisfy some of these requirements.
	o An overview of the OGSA-DAI architecture.
	o OGSA-DAI extensibility points.
	o How OGSA-DAI is being used in other projects.

By the end of the tutorial the attendees should have a strong understanding
of how OGSA-DAI works and how they may subsequently be able to use it to meet
their own data access requirements within Grids.
 

synopsis: The UK based OGSA-DAI (Open Grid Service Architecture - Data Access and Integration) project is producing middleware to access and integrate data source using web service in Grid environments. OGSA-DAI is already being used by a number of large projects both within the US and UK to satisfy their data access and integration requirements. In addition to this the OGSA-DAI project is working in close collaboration with other major Grid middleware providers, such as Globus and the UK OMII, to ensure that OGSA-DAI integrates seamlessly with their products. 

OGSA-DAI currently supports access to data held in various types of data sources 
such as relational databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, DB2, Oracle, SQLServer), data in XML repositories (Xindice), and data in flat files (SwissProt, OMIM). These are just the officially supported databases - OGSA-DAI has also been shown to work with other databases such as eXist. Data integration capabilities are also available through OGSA-DQP (Distributed Query Processing), middleware currently layered on top of OGSA-DAI but which will be more closely integrated within OGSA-DAI in the near future.

An introduction will be given to some of the underlying design principles used 
in OGSA-DAI, the functional capabilities of OGSA-DAI services, the architectural 
framework in which these currently operate and some future directions. It is unlikely that all functional requirements for a given project could be met by 
the base distribution hence the OGSA-DAI architecture has been designed to be highly extensible. These extensibility points and how they may be exploited will be presented.

OGSA-DAI has been around for about 3 years now and in this time has released
six major and three minor distributions. After each of these release a dialogue
has entered into with users to determine their future requirements and how they 
are currently using OGSA-DAI. This has allowed the middleware to develop
in a way that attempts to take into account actual usage practice and has
informed the OGSA-DAI developers as to how the software is actually being used
in the field. Some of these real use cases will be shown in this presentation.

For more details, visit the project website at
http://www.ogsadai.org.uk.


By the end of this tutorial attendees should have:

  o An understanding of what some of the data access and integration
    requirements for applications on the Grid are and the possible 
    solutions to achieve this.
  o Background knowledge of what OGSA-DAI is, what its scope is and 
    its relationship to other Grid middleware efforts is.
  o Understand the OGSA-DAI architecture and how it can be extended.
 

tech_requirements:  

prereq_participants:  

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