[Nml-wg] Example topology of Automated GOLE

[Jerry Sobieski]

Hi Roman  and everyone-

The topology that Jeroen distributed was the topo used last fall for our 
NSI demos.   And we did use the UvA SNE editor to initially create that 
topology.   And that version of the topo should still be compatible with 
SNE.

But the graphical representation created by SNE is not automatic - it is 
manually created by the individual building the topology...   Attached 
is the diagram we used for public consumption last fall.   A more useful 
approach (IMO) to learn NSI or to understand the AutoGOLE fabric than 
the SNE graphical display of this topology would be to look at any one 
NSI Network - say Netherlight.ets - in the diagram, and study its 
components in the OWL topology file to learn those relations to NSAs, 
STPs, location info, etc.   Once you understand the set of topological 
relations to one particular network, the other networks in the overall 
topology are simply repeated themes.   This high level top down approach 
to understanding the topology is much more effective than the SNE 
graphics IMO.  Indeed, I had to manually edit the SNE graphical layout 
(manually computing the coordinates of each object) in order to get a 
meaningful graphical display from the topology.  The SNE editor is a 
very basic tool.   And certain necessary topological relations cause 
graphical diagrams to get complex and busy very quickly.    So, the 
prospect of graphically editing any but the simplest topologies requires 
a rather inteligent editing tool that understands and uses the network 
semantics - not just RDF relations - to develop the graphical 
representation and manipulation interactions.

As the topology continues to get more complex it has become unwieldy to 
use the SNE editor in its current form to work on it.  So the topo 
releases we are moving to this spring are not built using SNE.   The 
rest of the OWL topology representation is the same, and I am pretty 
sure SNE can still be used to process it, but these other 
semantic/graphical issues make the SNE tool less useful than it might be 
for building more complex network topologies.  NOTE:  SNE is the only 
tool I know that understand the OWL data format and so I believe it 
might be more useful for representing RDF semantic relations rather than 
building network topologies per se...so don't take this critique of SNE 
as a swipe at it...we just need a tool more aimed at network service 
architectures than semantic web applications.   I always think of 
CASE/CAE tools, or an object oriented approach, as a potentially more 
effective GUI model.

We *do* need some sort of graphical editor for managing large scale 
topological information, but we need some editing features that are not 
currently available in SNE (or any other similar topology tool AFAIK).  
These would include graphical sumarization and layering (not just 
hardware, but service layering, control plane layers, etc.), 
auto-routing/placement that "makes sense" within the semantic context of 
the objects and that minimizes visual clutter, color coding would be 
useful, groupings and graphical object editing ala Powerpoint or the 
like, etc.   These are largely human-interface/presentation issues, some 
graphical bugs resolved, etc., but nevertheless these features are why 
we want graphical editors for this task, and these would make graphical 
management of topologies much more intuitive and efficient - and thus used.

I would suggest that if you are starting out to create a basic topology 
from scratch, the SNE editor is very good place to begin.  It works fine 
for a basic not-too-complex topology and generates an OWL file with all 
the headers required for this data representation form.  You can learn a 
fair bit about NSI by building some simple topologies using SNE.   And 
then you can study the resulting OWL output and extend the topology 
using SNE or other conventional editing tools or auto-generating scripts 
to generate larger more complex OWL based topologies.   And I think you 
can still feed those auto-generated topologies into SNE for a rough 
validation.   (There may be other ways to validate an OWL topology file 
I am not aware of...Jeroen?  Any thoughts on this?)

Just some observations...
Jerry

On 2/13/12 12:21 PM, Jeroen van der Ham wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 13 Feb 2012, at 16:32, Roman Łapacz wrote:
>> if I'm not wrong the NSI group uses some tool to generate diagrams from such topology files. Is it possible to get a diagram based on the example file you sent?
>
> The Automated GOLE demo uses a similar editor available for the NML editor.
> The Automated GOLE editor is available at: http://auto-gole.appspot.com
>
> (The NML editor is available at http://nml-editor.appspot.com)
>
> Jeroen.
>
>
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