Application-driven development improves OGSA-DAI

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In September last year, the OGSA-DAI project began an application-driven development project to add new functionality needed by the e-Research community. The project’s first success, in collaboration with the VOTES project, has led to the first integration of several relational databases. This new functionality has been released in an OGSA-DAI extension pack.

VOTES (Virtual Organisations for Trials and Epidemiological Studies) examines the ways in which Grid technologies can aid clinical trials, in particular: patient recruitment, data collection and trial management. VOTES wanted OGSA-DAI to access information stored across several relational databases and then integrate this data by, in essence, performing a cross-database join. This was not an out-of-the-box function. However, OGSA-DAI’s design makes it straightforward to add such application-specific functionality.

Over a series of meetings, the OGSA-DAI and VOTES teams identified three new functional components that would provide VOTES with the capabilities they wanted. This resulted in OGSA-DAI activities, which allows OGSA-DAI to support nested in-clause queries and cross-database joins. The new activities were tested and packaged as an OGSA-DAI 3.0 extension pack, which is available for download from the OGSA-DAI website. According to Anthony Stell from the VOTES project, the collaborative work with OGSA-DAI has “provided a model for requirement-driven development that would be of great benefit to the e-Research field at large”. He thought that the new functionality would be “a critical component when attempting to build any information grid”.

Working closely with application-specific projects is a new venture for the OGSA-DAI project. It is proving to be a very effective way of extending OGSA-DAI’s functionality while directly assisting users. “It’s a two-way street”, says OGSA-DAI Developer Alistair Grant, “working together with VOTES means that they get new software and assistance to solve their problem, and we get a genuine use case which helps extend OGSA-DAI”.

Please contact OGSA-DAI if you would like to discuss a potential collaboration.

Mario Antonioletti

info@ogsadai.org.uk

www.ogsadai.org.uk/help/votes