[communities] GGF Proposal Submission

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

proposers_name: Amy Krause 
 
affiliation: EPCC, The University of Edinburgh 

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

proposed_title: OGSA-DAI Tutorial 

session_type: Tutorial 

proposed_duration: 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: 20 

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 and how to exploit them.
	o Features of the current release.
	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
existing data resources using web services 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. 

The current releases are available on two platforms: OGSA-DAI WSRF 2.1 which 
integrates with Globus 4.0.1, and WSI 2.1 which is compatible with Axis 1.2.1, 
OMII 2.0 or OMII 2.1.
Features of the new releases include session support, concurrent request execution
and queueing of requests as well as various performance improvements. 
An improved client toolkit operates platform independent and enables cross-platform 
data delivery between OGSA-DAI services. Security is now supported on the Globus 
WSRF platform.

Data integration capabilities are also available through OGSA-DQP (Distributed Query 
Processing), middleware layered on top of OGSA-DAI. DQP uses OGSA-DAI for consistent
access to database metadata and to interact with databases on the Grid in order to
efficiently evaluate distributed queries and process complex data-intensive requests. 
A new release of DQP building on OGSA-DAI WSRF/WSI 2.1 is planned for 
December 2005 and the tutorial will present an overview of the features of DQP.

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 future directions. 
The OGSA-DAI architecture has been designed to be highly extensible as it is unlikely 
that all functional requirements for a given project could be met by the base 
distribution. These extensibility points and how they may be exploited will be presented.

OGSA-DAI has released seven major distributions. After the latest release the 
development team has again entered into a dialogue with users and interested groups 
to determine their future requirements and how they are currently using OGSA-DAI. 
This will allow 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, please 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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