OGSA-DAI
Summary
OGSA-DAI is a product for accessing and integrating structured and semi-structured data via web services.
Download
The latest version of OGSA-DAI can be download from SourceForge
.
System Requirements
OGSA-DAI will run on Linux and Windows (basically any platform that supports Java). It requires a servlet container (either Tomcat with Axis or the Globus container) in which to operate. Apache ANT 1.7 and Java 1.6+ are also required.
Further information
- Homepage
- Documentation
- OGSA-DAI licence (Apache 2.0) (links to Apache website)
- SVN (source code repository)
- Blog
- Mailing Lists
- Publications
- Tutorials and presentations
- Further support can be found on the OGSA-DAI support pages.
Developers
OGSA-DAI is developed by the OGSA-DAI team, who are based in EPCC at the University of Edinburgh and at NeSC.
Tutorials
The latest tutorials from OGSA-DAI are:
- The introduction to distributed data management and OGSA-DAI tutorial is a practical tutorial that provides an introduction to writing OGSA-DAI clients using the OGSA-DAI client toolkit.
- Distributed data access and management with OGSA-DAI is a lecture-based tutorial that gives an overview of OGSA-DAI and its operation.
Older tutorials are available from the OGSA-DAI website on the presentations and tutorials webpage.
What can it do?
A good example of OGSA-DAI usage is provided by the SEE-GEO project. The SEE-GEO project (SEcureE access to GEOspatial services) mapped the 2001 UK census statistics against data representing areas in the UK. This provided insight into variables such as the distribution of the population, the long-term ill, unemployment and many others.
The potential for mapping the UK census existed on two separate databases: the MIMAS database held census statistics and the EDINA database held data representing the area of the UK as a series of polygons. However, these databases used different languages. OGSA-DAI was used to merge two streams of data accessed via OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) standard interfaces: a Web Feature Service on top of the census output area, and a Geospatially linked Data Access Service on top of the statistics. The SEE-GEO client was used to formulate OGC Web Processing Service requests and dispatch these to OGSA-DAI. The resulting SEE-GEO client can generate maps of census data on the fly, which has freed users from having to do this themselves by downloading and processing the data.
Other projects using OGSA-DAI
Many projects use OGSA-DAI. Over forty of these projects are listed in the OGSA-DAI projects page.
How does it work?
OGSA-DAI is a middleware product that allows data resources, such as relational or XML databases, to be accessed via web services. An OGSA-DAI Web Service allows data to be queried, updated, transformed and delivered. OGSA-DAI web services can be used to provide web services that offer data integration services to clients.
OGSA-DAI enables you to:
- allow different types of data resources - including relational, XML and files - to be exposed using web services.
- provide a way of querying, updating, transforming and delivering data via web services.
- provide access to data in a consistent, data resource-independent manner.
- allow metadata, and the data resources in which this data is stored, to be accessed.
- support the integration of data from various data resources.
- provide Web Services that can be combined to provide higher-level Web Services that support data federation and distributed query processing.
- to contribute to a future in which researchers move away from technical issues and focus on application-specific data analysis and processing.
Previous releases of OGSA-DAI can be downloaded from the OGSA-DAI Release Archive.
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