James Myers, Al Geist, Elena Mendoza, Jens Schwidder, Alan Chappell
The SAM team's focus during the last quarter has been the development of SAM's Metadata Management Services layer and a transitional electronic laboratory notebook. As detailed below, the ability to generate metadata automatically from a binary, ascii, or XML input file has been added to the MMS layer. Development of a transitional DAV-based electronic notebook is well underway with an initial task to refactor the DOE2000 ELN to more easily support multiple server types now complete. Continuing efforts are being made to refine existing MMS capabilities, add a file translation mechanism, and implement a component-based security interface. Team members have also been active in community activities this quarter.
Also, as of the end of this quarter, Elena Mendoza will be leaving the project to pursue other opportunities, including work on the Collaboratory for Multiscale Chemical Sciences. Jim Myers will be working at PNNL to find a replacement(s).
Work continues to define a mechanism to design a security framework that allows using different authentication and authorization technologies. Efforts are underway to understand details of generic security technologies such as the Java Authentication and Authorization Service (JAAS) and to identify the appropriate integration points within the SAM middleware. An analysis of the classes and methods involved in Slide's existing security implementation is being documented in the project notebook.
Work has also begun to define a mechanism for connecting to "arbitrary" back-end databases. This will allow a DAV-based view of existing data which will in turn allow the data to be annotated with arbitrary additional metadata (e.g. pedigree information) without modification of the original data source. The current plans involve using Slide's Store interface to develop a generic component that will map between DAV and database schema using an XML map schema that can be configured by a SAM implementation administrator.
Metadata generation SAM now has a working mechanism to generate new properties based on the contents of uploaded files. The files can be of arbitrary type (e.g. binary, ascii, XML). For each mime-type, an XSLT script or a combination of Binary Format Description (BFD) and XSLT scripts can be specified. These scripts will be applied to the file content during an upload to the server resulting in new DAV properties. Stand-alone servlets with forms interfaces have been created that allow testing of XSLT and BFD scripts. The software has been made available to the Collaboratory for Multiscale Chemistry an Earth Systems Grid projects. We anticipate a publicly available test server in the near future.
Electronic Notebook The first major step in creating a DAV-enabled notebook has been completed. This involved refactoring of the client software of the existing open-source Electronic Laboratory Notebook (ELN) created within the DOE2000 project to isolate the user interface from the specifics of the server implementation. The development of a DAV server implementation is now underway.
SAM team members participated in several meetings, workshops, and other discussions during the last quarter:
Collaboratory for Multiscale Chemical Science (CMCS) Team Workshop, Advisory Board meeting, and Basic Energy Sciences SciDAC Projects Meeting, June 11-14, 2002: SAM metadata management layer capabilities, including event publishing and metadata generation, were demonstrated at the CMCS team workshop and to the CMCS advisory board and BES SciDAC principal investigators.
"Laboratory Notebooks 2002", Philadelphia, May 16-17, 2002: Al Geist was invited to present a talk entitled " Supporting the Laboratory Notebook and Its Information—Capturing and Storing Meta-Data" that will describe the SAM infrastructure supporting notebooks. Due to strong demand, the conference will be repeated Aug. 14-15th.
The recently awarded GTL Goal 4 proposal "From Molecular Machines to Hierarchical Modeling", Al Geist (ORNL) and Grant Heffelfinger (Sandia), will leverage technology developed as part of the SAM project, in particular, metadata management services for recording and keeping track of data pedigree from experiments and simulations.
Last updated: 7/19/02