AMUC: Associated Motion Capture User Categories

AHRC - EPSRC e-science demonstrator

COBrA-CT is supported by the BBSRC under the e-Science programme, starting 1/10/2005. The project is led by Prof Bonnie Webber and Dr Wenfei Fan, School of Informatics, and Prof Jonathan Bard, Biomedical Sciences, University of Edinburgh.

Data curation is important for many scientific communities and in standards initiatives, and curation has been recognised as a priority for e-Science. Ontologies are of central importance in curation, as only by defining the meaning of terms can the underlying concepts be clarified and agreed upon among the research community, and used consistently for annotating data.

A consistent, shared ontology is of critical importance to the sharing of knowledge, and has long-term value in supporting a systems-level approach to biology. For example, the Gene Ontology is in widespread use for data mining and data visualisation, and has great potential for further integration of data across the different levels of biological granularity.

However, ontologies are not static: they must change to reflect changes in science, to adapt to new uses, to broaden their community or to remedy flaws. Ontologies have also been identified as key resources in numerous e-Science projects, including AstroGrid, MyGrid and the Advanced Knowledge Technologies IRC. Providing tools for ontology version management is our initial goal, and in order to have a stable platform for the proposed ontology management server, we have chosen the OGSA-DAI Grid middleware for both client and server.

CoLaB, short for the Collaboration of Leeds and Beihang, is a joint laboratory founded by the Institute of Advanced Computing Technology of BeiHang University, China & Distributed Systems and Services Group of University of Leeds, UK., in 2005 summer.

Founded in 1999, focuses on advanced computer technology both in theories and applications. The main research direction of the institute includes:

• Grid Computing: including service grid and its supporting environment, grid middleware, distributed computing, resource sharing, grid supporting tools.
• Network and Information Securities: including formalizing analyses of security protocols, distributed access control, intrusion detection system.
• Software Architecture and Computing Environment in Internet: including XML processing techniques, Web services middle and ASP mode supporting.
• Web Service and its application in E-government, E-commerce, and finance.
• Embedded Systems

The group unites two central research themes within the mainstream of Computer Science - architecture and systems, each linked through a common objective: to support the needs of the next generation of distributed/Internet computing. Grid Computing is one of such examples that enable advanced e-Science and e-Business applications, distinguished from conventional distributed computing by its focus on large-scale, dynamical interactions and resource sharing across different virtual organizations.

This distribution contains the revised automated Commissioned Software build process used internally at OMII to generate the binary Commissioned Software releases from source. It is intended to allow and encourage our Commissioned Software partners to proactively test the integrity and compatibility of their source releases (and generated binary releases) with respect to the revised CS Integration Specification.

This distribution also contains a simple example counter service called CSTestService, distributed as source compatible with the CS build process and server and client installers. On installation it configures a database, and utilises the provided database functionality to store and retrieve state from the provided CS database.

In September 2005 six Community Grid projects and the D-Grid Integration Project (DGI) started to build a sustainable Grid infrastructure in Germany, to establish methods of e-science in the German scientific community.

EMBRACE Network of Excellence

A European Model for Bioinformatics Research and Community Education

The objective of EMBRACE is to draw together a wide group of experts throughout Europe who are involved in the use of information technology in the biomolecular sciences. The EMBRACE Network of Excellence will optimise informatics and information exploitation by pure and applied biological scientists in both the academic and commercial sectors.

The network will work to integrate the major databases and software tools in bioinformatics, using existing methods and emerging Grid service technologies. The integration efforts will be driven by an expanding set of test problems representing key issues for bioinformatics service providers and end-user biologists. As a result, groups throughout Europe will be able to use the EMBRACE service interfaces for their own local or proprietary data and tools.

Many environmental problems, such as transport of pollutants, development of remediation strategies, weathering, and containment of high-level radioactive waste, require an understanding of fundamental mechanisms and processes at a molecular level. Computer simulations at a molecular level can give considerable progress in our understanding of these processes. The vision of the eMinerals project is to combine developments in atomistic simulation tools with emerging grid computing technologies in order to stretch the potential for undertaking simulation studies under increasingly realistic conditions, and which can scan across a wide range of physical and chemical parameters.

The eMinerals project brings together simulation scientists, applications developers and computer scientists to develop UK escience/grid capabilities for molecular simulations of environmental issues. A common set of simulation tools is being developed for a wide range of applications, and the integrated compute/data grid environment that is being established will lead to a significant leap in the capabilities of these powerful scientific tools. This work is supported by an effort to support the working of the eMinerals project team as a fully functional virtual organisation and collaboratory.

The FirstDIG project is a collaboration between First plc and the National e-Science Centre, as represented by EPCC. The project deployed an early implementation of the OGSA Data Access and Integration (OGSA-DAI) services within the First South Yorkshire bus operational environment. The project had two central goals. The first was to demonstrate the deployment of OGSA-DAI services in a commercial environment. The second goal was to answer specific business questions through a short data mining analysis of OGSA-DAI service-enabled data sources. The business questions were posed by First plc.

GEDDM is a research project being jointly developed by Datactics Limited and the Belfast e-Science Centre (BESC) with funding from the DTI (Department of Trade and Industry).

This project will combine the skills and experience of the stakeholders by developing a service oriented grid based framework that will define, coordinate and manage access to distributed unstructured data. This grid based framework will aid the integrate with core backend data mining services, manage relevant security issues in a distributed environment and allow the integration of distributed resources at BESC and Datactics.

The Geosciences Network (GEON) project is a collaboration among a dozen PI institutions and a number of other partner projects, institutions, and agencies to develop cyberinfrastructure in support of an environment for integrative geoscience research. GEON is funded by the NSF Information Technology Research (ITR) program.

The proposed project aims to extend the state-of-art Grid technology to a completely new and societally important category of applications. It will develop and thoroughly evaluate the novel concepts of knowledge discovery in databases and other large data sets attached to the Grid. The project focuses its effort on data mining and On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP), two complementary technologies, which, if applied in conjunction, can provide a highly efficient and powerful data analysis and knowledge discovery solution on the Grid. These two technologies will be investigated and experimentally implemented within a novel infrastructure called GridMiner, which will be built on top of services developed by other Grid projects.

Parallel and distributed query evaluation and optimization techniques, like OLAP aggregation and query results caching, will be extended and adapted to this environment to guarantee high performance and good scalability even for very large data sets as they commonly occur in large-scale scientific and commercial applications.

GridSAM is an open-source job submission and monitoring web service.

This project is funded by the UK Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute UK (OMII-UK) commissioned software programme. The aim of GridSAM is to provide a Web Service for submitting and monitoring jobs managed by a variety of Distributed Resource Managers (DRM). The modular design allows third-party to provide submission and file-transfer plug-ins to GridSAM. Moreover the job management API used by the GridSAM web service can be embedded into grid application that requires job submission and monitoring capabilities.

GridSAM endorses the WS-I+ set of web service standards and the Job Submission Description Language developing in the Global Grid Forum.

The GridSphere portal framework provides an open-source portlet based Web portal. GridSphere enables developers to quickly develop and package third-party portlet web applications that can be run and administered within the GridSphere portlet container.

The mission of this proposal is to achieve the "development of an interoperable framework for connecting isolated, distributed and heterogeneous, biodiversity and bioresources databases" using webservices architecture.

This would be achieved through following objectives;

• Development of biodiversity and bioresources data providers registry service.
• Development of Biodiversity Database Interoperability (data aggregation, indexing, transformation) tools.
• Biodiversity Data Access (Search engines, XML web services and HTML interface) schemas and portal.

ImmunoGrid is a computer model of the Human Immune System implemented with Grid technologies.

It integrates processes at molecular, cellular and organ levels.

ImmunoGrid is a project funded by the European Commission under the contract FP6-2004-IST-4, NO 028069.

The overall aim of the project is to develop and refine the experimental steering process, shared workspace and distributed visualisation into a VRE making them deployable by dispersed teams of instrument scientists, material scientists and engineers in a transparent and robust manner.

The specific objectives are to:

• Set up a medium for collaboratively managing and analysing data and to make available archival data collected elsewhere for immediate side-by-side comparisons
• To achieve multi-site experiment steering, to discuss progress, modify strategies, and to train and instruct students
• Improve the HCI issues within the shared-workspace between the dispersed sites
• Create guidelines for the use of remote steering and collaborative environments.

IU RGRbench (Indiana University Relational Grid Resources bench) is a grid information services benchmark/workload used to better understand resource information management in grid information servers. OGSA-DAI is a data access and integration framework, built to the OGSA standard, for grid services-based access to databases. In the spirit of conjunction with the UK e-Science OGSA-DAI group, we have undertaken a couple collaborative efforts:

• Evaluation of OGSA-DAI v2.0 using IU RGRbench.
• Portal interface to OGSA-DAI

The general objectives of the Lancaster Centre for e-Science are: to accelerate the development of a new kind of computing and data management infrastructure for the social sciences, and to support the increasingly national and global collaborations emerging in many areas of science.

• CQeSS
• ReDReSS
• VRE Demonstrator
• GROWL
• Centre of Excellence
• Sabre
• e-CollaborationTools

This distribution contains the automated Managed Programme build process used internally at OMII to generate the binary Managed Programme releases from source. It is intended to allow and encourage our Managed Programme partners to proactively test the integrity and compatibility of their source releases (and generated binary releases) with respect to the MP Integration Specification.

This distribution also contains a simple example counter service called MPTestService, distributed as source compatible with the MP build process. On installation it configures a database, and utilises the provided database functionality to store and retrieve state from the provided MP database.

The focus of the project is the development of N2Grid, a neural network environment based on the Grid.

The N2Grid System consists of serveral Web Services (Java AXIS) and an WWW graphical user interface (GUI) developed for Tomcat 5.0.x/AXIS 1.2. The first version of the system was developed by a group of students during the IT(Mag.)/NN exercise in the summer term 2004 at the University of Vienna under the guidance of Thomas Weishäupl.

NEReSC is funding or involved in a number of research projects/activities:

• BASIS
• CRISP
• Dynasoar
• OGSA-DQP
• eXSys
• GridMIST
• Microbase
• e-Demand
• myGrid
• GridSHED
• GOLD
• Polar*
• UK-OGSA Evaluation Web Services Grid Application Framework
• CoreGRID partner

Data discovery and delivery are inherent components of many aspects of science. They can be considered part of a processing chain that starts with raw data from a variety of sources, and ends with the graphical production of information that is directly used in scientific research.

This proposal is to build a grid which makes data discovery, delivery and use much easier than it is now, facilitating better use of the existing investment in the curation and maintenance of quality data archives. Further we intend to make the connection between data held in managed archives and data held by individual research groups seamless in such a way that the same tools can be used to compare and manipulate data from both sources. What will be completely new will be the ability to compare and contrast data from an extensive range of (US, European, UK, NERC) datasets from within one specific context.

The NDG is funded jointly by the Natural Environment Research Council and the national e-science core programme.

The aim of the NeuroGrid consortium is to enhance collaboration between clinical, imaging and e-scientists to create a Grid-based network of neuroimaging centres and a neuroimaging tool-kit. Sharing data, experience and expertise will facilitate the archiving, curation, retrieval and analysis of imaging data from multiple sites and enable large-scale clinical studies.

A critical strategy of the NeuroGrid project is to provide enabling capabilities for the neuroimaging community by using Grid technology to allow current algorithms and existing data management procedures to be more accessible and interoperable, so that there are low barriers to entry and time is not wasted re-engineering well established algorithms or forcing alien practices on established research groups. Although the primary aim is not to produce new research data, NeuroGrid will produce valuable new scientific findings from the application of cutting edge analytic methods to combined existing datasets.

This MRC funded 3 year project started in March 2005 and brings together clinical and technological experience from multiple collaborators.

The NGS Applications Repository is an open access portal used to describe and list applications and their associated artefacts that are available on NGS resources. Applications are fully described using middleware agnostic JSDL documents, which can be searched for by categories of interest (Job Submission Description Language - OGF Standard). All necessary information required to execute hosted applications is captured in full by their associated JSDL (including download links to application specific artefacts, e.g. example input files and scripts). Users may select and save JSDL application descriptions into their own personal repository for subsequent modification and personal configuration. User communities benefit by distributing and sharing their JSDL application descriptions, related artefacts and associated expertise.

The National Transport Data Framework is a system which will improve access to a variety of transport and other relevant data for users and will be the hub of a network of collaborations of companies, universities and organisations to develop associated projects.

The UK needs ways of accessing reliable data on transport for planning by transport operators, government departments and local authorities and for research. Research at the University of Cambridge and Imperial College London is looking into ways of giving users access to such high-quality, particularly realtime data on transport. The work will not actually look at storing data as such; rather the data will be presented in accessible form by applying metadata techniques to it.

OGSA-DAI Demo for Genetics.

This project has demonstrated how Grid technologies can be used to enable true e-Science - discoveries that would not otherwise have been achieved without this infrastructure in place.

Open Grid Manager (OGM) is a lightweight open source grid management framework that provides a cohesive solution for monitoring and managing arrays of heterogeneous grid resources deployed within live production grids and enterprises.

OGRSH is a Linux software product which allows users to access both local and grid resources as if they were all provided in a local environment without modification of source or binaries. This ties in with the Genesis II grid design principle of marrying grid functionality with legacy application access. Through OGRSH the UNIX bash shell can seamlessly move between local and grid spaces granting users a familiar environment within which to work in a grid world. This can include simple directory and file access patterns like ls, cat, cp, and cd as well as more complex legacy applications run through the shell like gnomad, and illustrative bash shell scripts.

OMII provides an open source system that addresses the user requirements of combining ease of installation and use within a secure environment. The OMII release focuses on the needs of distinct yet important stakeholders within Grid computing: the Service Provider and the Client.

OMII provides an open source system that addresses the user requirements of combining ease of installation and use within a secure environment. The OMII release focuses on the needs of distinct yet important stakeholders within Grid computing: the Service Provider and the Client.

OMII provides a professional grid infrastructure to support collaborative computing in a secure and accountable manner. We address the needs of administrators by providing a simple to install and manage infrastructure without the usual security worries. We address the needs of service and resource providers by providing a detailed accounting model linked to the authorisation system.

Developers can write standard web-services and benefit from the security and authorisation model of the OMII service provider. Users can interact with the OMII grid using either a command line tool or through any application using the supplied Java programming interface.

OMII provides an open source system that addresses the user requirements of combining ease of installation and use within a secure environment. The OMII release focuses on the needs of distinct yet important stakeholders within Grid computing: the Service Provider and the Client.

OMII provides a professional grid infrastructure to support collaborative computing in a secure and accountable manner. We address the needs of administrators by providing a simple to install and manage infrastructure without the usual security worries. We address the needs of service and resource providers by providing a detailed accounting model linked to the authorisation system.

Developers can write standard web-services and benefit from the security and authorisation model of the OMII service provider. Users can interact with the OMII grid using either a command line tool or through any application using the supplied Java programming interface.

The system consists of a light weight agent (OGM-Agent) deployed on the grid resources to be managed that communicates with a suite of web services (OGM-Server) exposing persistent registry capabilities.

As an open and extensible solution, OGM allows you to easily integrates Grid management information into a range of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based infrastructures including existing enterprise management and operations support system (OSS) solutions.

The Portlet Access Grid project intends to develop a fully-functional portlet client for the Access Grid Toolkit version 3 (AGTkv3) that in addition enables automatic and transparent switching to unicast when multicast becomes unavailable, allows the use of Access Grid behind restrictive firewalls and from low bandwidth connections, and significantly simplifies the installation procedure for users.

Computational Steering Library and Toolkit

One of the most challenging aspects of web service orchestration is the matching of the ultimate product of the composite web service to the task the user needs the product for. Grid web services adopt a workflow-based model for matching web services to users' tasks.

The SAW-GEO project has been developed and funded to address the potential of workflow engines in the orchestration of OGC services and to demonstrate the capability of such developed systems in real-world applications.

It builds upon the expertise available at Newcastle University in areas of geospatial data handling.

Integration of grids and Shibboleth is being hampered because a users' attributes are typically held in different locations, under different identifiers, and there is no coherent way of collecting them together and validating that they all belong to the same user so that they can be used for authorization of the user's request.

This project proposes to address this directly. Specifically the objectives of this project are to:

• Work with the international community, primarily the Internet2 consortium and the Globus Consortium, but including SWITCH, TERENA and others, to develop the Shibboleth protocol specifications, based on SAMLv2 and other protocols, that will allow a Shibboleth service provider (SP) to collect together a user's attributes from multiple authorities, whilst preserving the user's privacy, so that the aggregated attributes can be used to authorise the user's request. This will significantly ease the integration of Shibboleth with grids. However, the resulting attribute aggregation protocol will be of benefit to any Shibboleth enabled SP be it a web service, a grid service, or a conventional Shibboleth SP etc.
• Build a Policy Information Point (the nAA-PIP) that will evaluate the collected attributes (or credentials) according to the configured trust policy of the Service Provider (SP) and will return the valid set of attributes to the SP's Policy Enforcement Point (PEP). The PEP can then pass the complete set of validated and aggregated attributes to a conventional Policy Decision Point (PDP) for it to make access control decisions. The nAA-PIP will be fully standards conformant, and will be called by the SP through either the standard web services protocol that is being defined by the OGSA-Authz WG or by a Java API that is already implemented in Globus Toolkit and is also due to be published by the OGSA-Authz WG.
• Implement the aggregation protocol within the nAA-PIP so that it is capable of collecting the attributes itself from the multiple authorities, prior to validation.
• Build a pilot demonstrator for the National Grid Service that will show how attributes from multiple AAs can be integrated together and used in authorisation decision making at grid sites that use shibboleth IdPs.
• release all the developed software as open source code through NMI/OMII to the community at large, with a full set of specifications and documentation.

Virgo aims to implement large scaleable Network with easy management and scalable security. It can be used in the fields such as Grid Computing, Distributed Domain Name System, Distributed Search Engines, and File Shares, Instant Message, etc.

WHIP is a lightweight, modular set of plugins enabling the sharing of software components (descriptions, data, executables) between diverse distributed entities including Web-based portals, thick clients, and Web Services.