OGSA-DAI: Middleware for Data Integration: Selected Applications

Abstract

In modern distributed computing, vast amounts of data are stored in many different formats, employing different storage solutions. Much of modern research involves analyzing data arising from experiments and simulations held in existing repositories often owned by different organizations and partners. With on-line storage and provisioning, sharing data has become a key part of modern research in science and humanities fields. As data can be distributed across multiple geographical locations, use different formats and access mechanisms, a solution to facilitate data sharing to enable researchers and developers whilst also satisfying the requirements of the data providers would be advantageous.OGSA-DAI 3.0 [1] is such a middleware software solution. It provides application developers with the means to access data distributed across multiple platforms with different native access mechanisms. Data integration can take place at the server and deliver results using a variety of protocols and mechanisms within OGSA-DAI. It accomplishes this by using a highly flexible and extensible framework which can accommodate different types of data resources, such as XML databases, relational databases or files, different operations such as transformation to different formats, selection or filter operations. The framework can be extended by a developer to provide customized functionality for project specific tasks while using generic functions for common tasks such as database querying.OGSA-DAI 3.0 executes data-centric workflows composed of activities (a discreet operational task) which can target different resources. Workflows can be simple, such as querying a database and delivering results to an FTP server or they can be more complex, such as querying relational and XML databases within in a single workflow, copying information from these from one source to another whilst e-mailing the information copied to a change archive account based on different criteria.

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“…Figure 2 shows the generic architecture of the GSL services. GSL consists of the following services; user interaction with these components is shown in Figure 3 (Grant et al 2008) for distributed access of data from the collaborating ground stations. 3.…”

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