Web 2.0 and Grids Workshop at OGF21

Instruments and sensors provide observational data needed to drive the engine of discovery in science. Availability and accessibility of appropriate instrumentation for a given research programme can be a rate limiting factor in discovery. Furthermore sensors and sensor networks are playing an ever-increasing role in longitudinal studies in ecological, earth and biological sciences. The Common Instrument Middleware Architecture (CIMA) is a means of improving accessibility and usability of critical research resources, and provides application-level access to remote instruments and sensors through interface and protocol standards based on Web Services and a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach.

As a counterpoint to Web Services (but not SOA), Web 2.0 technologies show great promise for increasing the diversity and rate of production of new services as well as the accessibility and reuse of existing services. In this paper we discuss the impact of Web 2.0 technologies and applications on the evolution of the CIMA architecture and the design of RESTful services for instruments, sensors and other real-time data sources.

UNICORE is an established Grid platform providing access to distributed computational resources, particularly HPC resources. Over the past 10 years we have seen UNICORE in production usage at many supercomputer centres and used in many projects. In summer 2007 the final version of the WS-RF compliant, OGSA based UNICORE 6 [1] is released. Building on the core values of UNICORE - "seamless, intuitive and secure access" - in this OGF session we propose to explore the opportunities from closely aligning the Grid and the Web to build a newthe next generation of UNICORE. We intend to give an introduction to the key concepts and a short demonstration of a proof of concept implementation during the session.

This deep integration leads to the embedding of the Grid into the larger Web (more precisely the Semantic Web). As such the Web can be seen as the global, homogenizing middleware layer for the Grid. A RESTful use of HTTP and a unified model for the information of the Grid, result in a loosely-coupled and internet-scale architecture. Each grouping of computational resources (normally aligned with administrative boundaries) have a projection onto the Web. The URI space for a single site is partitioned according to the resources in the site, maintaining a single point of access and the virtualisation of these resources. Viewed from a global perspective, this proposed new UNICORE Grid consists of a distribution of Grid Web sites.

We take a resource-oriented approach where each significant resource (Sites, Users, Files, Jobs, etc) are named with HTTP URIs, and from which various representations can be obtained (RDF, JSON, HTML). Following the recommendations of LinkingOpenData [21] initiative this information about the Grid of computational resources adds to the Web of Data. Resource and data management is performed through the manipulation of this information. Knowledge representation offered by the Semantic Web stack of technologies provides the basis for additional information to be attached to the resources of the Grid. For example, 'tagging' items in the Grid and publishing other additional domain-specific data, and this is a basis for the participatory Grid, offering for example, the selected sharing of jobs and data. Other sites perform an aggregating role (similar to Google search or Yahoo pipes) providing users with a high-level view of their distributed resources and tools to interact with them. For example, searching functionality across this information using the Semantic Web query language SPARQL, providing virtualised views over distributed data, and finally visualisation using timelines and maps.

Only few companies or organizations in the world have the data and computational infrastructure to support the contemporary needs of researchers. Collaboration, data/information/knowledge sharing and discovery, archiving, large-scale computation, etc. are only few of the requirements a modern research platform should support. Is it feasible for research organizations to maintain their own research infrastructure; is a paradigm shift necessary?

The Web has evolved from a distributed information systems for the presentation of information to a large-scale application platform. Modern applications exist on the Web, they combine data and functionality from distributed sources, and they bring people together in domain-specific social networks. Are traditional middleware platforms a thing of the past and is the outsourcing of infrastructure/services becoming a necessity?

Today's graduate students belong to the YouTube generation. They are already authors on papers and will be tomorrow's leading scientists. In short, we are on the verge of having a new generation of scientists who are comfortable with and utilize the short video clip and the tools that go with them e.g., iPods. Publishers and the community at large have been slow to take advantage of this phenomenon

With open access publications from the Public Library of Science (PLoS) and later with abstracts of closed access publications we will provide a Web resource for authors to upload up to a ten minute video clip which provides a synopsis of the work presented in a published peer review paper. The clip will be expected to briefly introduce the motivation for the work, present the experiment the most salient results and a brief conclusion. This is similar to an extended abstract, but using a different medium and akin to the short talk formats offered at some conferences. We refer to these as SciVees and each journal represented constitutes a channel. Communities represent other multimedia materials not directly tied to a peer reviewed publication. Surfing through SciVee is intended to be like other broadcast media which ranges from high quality Public Broadcasting channels for smaller audiences to more popular material for broad consumption. We hope that scientific research and education will benefit from this endeavor.