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The "big issues" facing e-Research

Two important meetings took place in May which will shape the future role of OMII-UK.

Our biannual face-to-face included some of our PALs, who contributed valuable input and insight. The face-to-face provides an opportunity for the three OMII-UK sites (Southampton, Manchester and Edinburgh) to get together and work on issues facing OMII-UK and the e-Research community, including those issues identified by Engage (page 8). The meeting was a great success and we plan to invite more collaborators next time.

The OMII-UK Board, comprising stakeholders and external advisors, met in May to review OMII-UK and provide feedback. They emphasized OMII-UK's role in community development and consultancy, and were particularly pleased to see the different collaborations which were taking place and the ways in which we were improving our outreach and dissemination, some of which are highlighted in this newsletter. If you would like to collaborate with us, please get in touch!

Neil Chue Hong, OMII-UK Director

info@omii.ac.uk

Admirable software from OGSA-DAI

ADMIRE, a £4.3M EU Framework 7 project, kicked off at the beginning of March. Its aim - to advance the state of the art in distributed data integration and data mining on large-scale enterprise systems. ADMIRE brings together our OGSA-DAI team with other leading European data and semantic knowledge experts from all over Europe.

Europe leads the world in its use and development of advanced service-orientated business solutions. By focusing on advanced data mining and integration, ADMIRE will develop a flexible, service-oriented ‘data architecture’. This will introduce new capabilities in the merging of different sources of information, and enable researchers and analysts to ask - and answer - new kinds of questions in science and business intelligence.

www.admire-project.eu

OGSA-DAI for UNICORE and gLite

The OMII-Europe project has made OGSA-DAI 3.0 available for UNICORE 6 and gLite 3.1.

OGSA-DAI UN has been designed to operate in a UNICORE 6 environment, using the XFire SOAP engine and the UNICORE WSRF implementation within a Jetty container. OGSA-DAI GL has been designed to function in a gLite 3.1 environment and makes use of VOMS, which furnishes OGSA-DAI with attribute certificates. A new Policy Information Point and a new Policy Decision Point together with a new login provider have been implemented to provide an authorisation and authentication framework based on VOMS attributes.

http://repository.omii-europe.org

Facelift for OMII-UK website website

The OMII-UK website has been given a facelift to better represent OMII-UK and to make it easier to find the software and information that you need.

The most notable changes include a new look, improved navigation and a new interface to the software in our repository. The website will continue to develop over the coming months.

In the meantime, we’d love to hear your comments on the new-look website.

info@omii.ac.uk

www.omii.ac.uk

Google Summer of Code 2008

OMII-UK has been accepted as a mentoring organisation for the Google Summer of Code 2008. This let OMII-UK propose a number of projects to entice students to work on OMII-UK software during summer 2008. The students will be provided with a stipend from Google and, if successful, with a much coveted Google Summer of Code 2008 T-shirt!

We have six students who will be undertaking projects on a variety of our software. This could lead to a number of improvements and extensions to existing OMII-UK components and, more importantly, will encourage new talent to participate on Open Source endeavours.

www.tinyurl.com/6pl4tj