[sn-cg] hey, I know that guy...

[Fred Maciel]

Hi Chris,

> I was reading through the OGSA use cases yesterday and came 
> across references to 
> the "OGSA data management service". Unfortunately, this seems 
> to be a dangling 
> reference ... or my google skills are failing me.
> 
> Is there such a thing? Is this what the OGSA data group is working on?

In the following explanation, let me make 9 steps back so I can make 10
steps forward... :-)

First of all, by "use cases", I presume that you are talking about
GFD.29 (http://www.ggf.org/documents/GFD.29.pdf). This document has been
published two years ago -- in fact, it was published before the OGSA
document itself (GFD.30).  At this time, we already knew that there
would be data-related functionality in OGSA (at the same level of
compute-oriented functionality), but things were still not well defined.
In fact, the way things often work in the OGF is not by gathering
requirements and then writing specs, but by gathering use cases (GFD.29)
and then writing specs (GFD.30) -- so the use cases were an input to
OGSA (and its "data management"). This should explain the fact that the
references are "dangling".

After that, we created a "design team" in the OGSA-WG to work on the
data services architecture as one of the major subjects in OGSA. To make
a long story short, OGSA-WG often spin-offs WGs to do spec development
while OGSA-WG itself just writes profiles using the results. So data
design team was spun-off into the OGSA-Data working group.

https://forge.gridforum.org/sf/projects/ogsa-d-wg

So, yes, this what the OGSA data group is working on (which now means
two related documents, on architecture and scenarios).

https://forge.gridforum.org/sf/docman/do/listDocuments/projects.ogsa-d-w
g/docman.root.working_drafts

Remember that this is just the high-level architecture, and very general
use cases. Ideally, we should keep alignment of what we do here with
their framework (e.g. "this service that we are talking about here
implements part of the interfaces of that service that they identified
there").

Regards,

Fred Maciel
Hitachi America R&D