James Myers, Tara Talbott, Jens Schwidder, Al Geist, Mike Peterson, Alan Chappell, Carina Lansing
Since the last report, the SAM team has delivered a SAM 2.0 release incorporating key enhancements including
In addition, work to internationalize the Electronic Laboratory Notebook (ELN) client has been completed as part of a subcontract from the NSF-sponsored George E. Brown, Jr. National Earthquake Engineering and Simulation Grid (NEESgrid) project. The ELN now supports locale-dependent labels in menus and on buttons and allows entry of textual notes in any desired language.
Additional capabilities, in particular, an extended grammar for the DAV Searching and Locating (DASL) protocol allowing semantically scoped searches, and support for upload of specific byte ranges within resources (versus replacing the entire file), have been developed in this period and are being pilot tested within the Collaboratory for Multiscale Chemical Science.
Complementing this work were a large number of community interactions at major conferences and workshops including the DOE National Collaboratories Workshop Series, SuperComputing 2004, and the W3C "Semantic Web for Life Sciences" Workshop.
Semantic Grid: Work is continuing on the detailed design of SAM's Semantic Services (SS) layer and Semantic Grid concepts. A semantically-scoped search capability accessible via WebDAV's Distributed Searching and Locating (DASL) search mechanism has been developed. It is anticipated that the CMCS project will begin using this capability to provide flexible provenance-based queries in the next quarter. At the conceptual level, the work in this area is feeding into activities such as the DOE Data Management Workshop series, DOE COllaboratory Workshops, the GGF Semantic Grid Research Group, and proposal development. The RDF pedigree/provenance property, which includes reified information concerning the software used to generate derived data, has been temporarily ported to the SAM 2.0 framework (based on Jakarta Slide 2.0). The provenance capability is currently being generalized and incorporated into SAM's extension of the DASL basic grammar.
Data Format Description Language (DFDL):Work is continuing to design a standard for a language that can describe the content of arbitrary data files. The Grid Forum DFDL working group is very active and is currently developing an XML Schema-related syntax for the DFDL language. Examples forming a set of 'unit tests' and 'integration tests' have been developed and will drive the specification. The SAM team is very involved in crafting the standard and is contributed significant concepts that derive from the developed of the BFD language and its extensions within the SAM project. As the language nears standardization, the SAM team will be investigating design options for building a DFDL parser. Interest in DFDL is growing - as a technology for persistent archiving of arbitrary data, and as a grid data virtualization mechanism.
SAM Notebook Services Layer: Building on work to refactor the transitional ELN notebook support within SAM to create a high-level notebook services API, ORNL has migrated the DOE2000 eNote notebook to use SAM services. Over the next few months, work will be done to generalize the existing notebook service layer and data model which will provide a migration path for eNote users and will be leveraged in the development of web-based SAM annotation and notebook interfaces.
SAM team members participated in a wide range of meetings, workshops, reviews, and collaboration discussions during this quarter:
Collaboratory for Multiscale Chemical Science (CMCS): An ongoing collaboration related to the use of SAM as the primary CMCS data/metadata management system. CMCS and SAM are currently collaborating on performance enhancements, porting CMCS to SAM 2.0/2.1, adopting semantic search capabilities, and general hardening.
Network for Earthquake Engineering and Simulation (NEES) Grid: PNNL has completed a subcontract from the NEESgrid project. This effort focused on integration of the ELN and SAM with the NEESgrid portal, security mechanism, and metadata/data repository, and internationalization of the ELN (support for alternate languages for the labels used within the ELN user interface, and the ability to enter textual notes in alternate languages). All software from this project has been incorporated in to the standard SAM and ELN distributions. The ELN and SAM have been incorporated into the NEESGrid 3.2 Release.
Web Downloads Registrations to download SAM and notebook software are continuing at a pace of 1-2 per day.
International Conference on Semantics for a Networked World, with a focus on Grid Databases: Jim Myers was invited to serve on the Program Committee for this conference, which was held July 17-19, 2004, Paris, France.
GridSem 2004, 1st International Workshop on the Semantic Grid, Jim Myers was invited to serve on the program committee for this conference, which was held August 23-24, Valencia, Spain.