Scientific Annotation Middleware Project Status

Scientific Annotation Middleware (SAM) Project Status

Status as of December 31, 2001 / Quarterly report

Project Staff

James Myers, Al Geist, Elena Mendoza, Jens Schwidder

Progress

The SAM team's focus during the last quarter has been refining project requirements, investigating relevant technologies, and developing detailed design and implementation plans. Input and feedback on these plans are being provided by potential users of SAM, with the closest interactions being between the SAM and Collaboratory for Multiscale Chemical Science (CMCS) projects. As detailed below, significant progress has been made in the areas of detailed system design, establishment of a cross-site development environment, and community outreach. These accomplishments put the project on track to release an alpha version of SAM Metadata Services in the March timeframe.

Design Activities

The SAM team has reviewed requirements and use cases being developed by other SciDAC and National Collaboratories projects and has developed a revised set of requirements for SAM's

Basic Architecture
Metadata Management Services
Semantic Services
Notebook Services
Client-Side Components

These requirements organize and refine those outlined in the proposal. In parallel, the team has researched a variety of standards, technologies, and specific software components for use in SAM. In some cases, this has included small prototyping efforts. A major project decision was made - to use the Jakarta project's Slide content management system and DAV interface as a starting point for SAM development. Slide is an open source Java-based system that supports the basic data and metadata management capabilities defined by the DAV protocol. Slide has a modular design and provides several internal programming interfaces relevant for adding the additional functionality in the SAM requirements. Other design choices include the use of XSLT and PNNL's Binary Format Description laguage extensions to XSIL as the basis for intial translation capabilities and the use of JMS as an initial event publication mechanism. Drafts of the requirements documents have been shared with the CMCS project and we anticipate posting them on the website by mid-February. Additional documentation, outlining initial capabilities in the areas of translation, event publication, connections to external data stores, and integration with security services, will also be posted.

The design decisions made to date lead to the following general recommendations for incorporating SAM into projects:

Write project client software to use the DAV protocol for metadata/data transfer
Pilot client software using any DAV server implementation
Migrate to using Slide as a DAV server
SAM services will be delivered as updates/additions to the Slide class libraries and eventually as a standalone package
Pilot SAM translation, event and other services using its manual/web-based configuration/registration tools (client software does not change)
Incorporate use of SAM programatic registration/configuration interfaces into client software as desired.

The first three of these steps can be done immediately, making it possible to begin development even prior to the alpha release of SAM MMS services this spring.

Development Environment

The SAM team has an internal electronic notebook that is being used to capture research results, design discussions and decisions, project management information, contact/collaboration information, etc. The notebook is the primary information repository for the project and already contains hundreds of entries on over 50 pages.

A CVS server has been configured at PNNL to serve as the primary, shared software repository for the project. Access is secured by ssh. All accounts and approvals necessary for team members to access the repository have been obtained and the repository is in the process of being populated with the source code the SAM team will build upon. ANT-based build scripts have been created for components that did not have them.

Community Outreach

The SAM team participated in the National Collaboratories virtual meeting in November and is planning to attend the SciDAC/NC investigators meeting in January 2002. SAM Team members have been advising pilot projects on the selection of annotation and electronic notebook capabilities (including performing a small amount of work to modify existing DOE2000 notebook software to meet the needs of current SciDAC projects). The SAM project is coordinating closely with the CMCS project on defining functionality and schedules. SAM is also participating in discussions between CMCS and the University of Michigan's CHEF project on coordinating developments (CHEF will provide collaboration capabilities in projects such as the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation Grid (NEESGrid) project). Additional collaborations are being cultivated.

Last updated: 1/30/02