James Myers, Tara Talbott, Jens Schwidder, Mike Peterson, Al Geist, Alan Chappell
Since the last report, the SAM team has delivered a SAM 2.1 release incorporating new features requested by the Collaboratory for Multiscale Chemical Science project, along with bug fixes, into the SAM 2.0 code base. SAM 2.1 specifically adds
Complementing this work were 2 conference paper submissions, continuing involvement in defining the DFDL standard, and ongoing community interactions.
Semantic Grid: Work is continuing on the detailed design of SAM's Semantic Services (SS) layer and Semantic Grid concepts. A paper discussing SAM's ability to provide a bridge between file-based, webDAV, and semantic web applications, and providing technical detail of the SS layer capabilities will be presented at the Semantic Infrastructure for Grid Computing Applications Workshop in May. A further extension of the DASL basic grammar has been developed to allow the return of RDF or graph exchange language (GXL) representations of the metadata in SAM. This mechanism will replace the dynamically generated provenance properties currently in SAM. We are also investigating the potential for supporting early semantic web 'standards' for associating metadata with we resources such as the URIQA MPUT, MGET, MDELETE methods.
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 DFDL group has scheduled a face-to-face meeting for May 11-13, 2005, and the SAM team is preparing to lead discussion on a design to support "multiple layers" and related functionality. The SAM team is also coordinating the DFDL language definition effort with work within a new PNNL-funded Semantic Data Grid project to implement a DFDL-based parser and create a DFDL-based data virtualization service.
SAM Notebook Services Layer:Jens Schwidder has migrated the DOE2000 eNote notebook to use SAM services and has begun working to generalize the existing notebook service layer and data model to provide interoperability between different types of SAM-based notebooks and to enable a migration path for eNote and ELN users to future web-based SAM annotation and notebook interfaces. Tara Talbott is modifying the ELN client to support updates in the service layer and is continuing to add records-related functionality including the development of a signed audit log capability that records changes to the configuration of SAM-based notebooks and, in coordination with PNNL records managers, providing a general mechanism to support archiving of notebooks into records management systems.
SAM team members participated in a range of meetings, workshops, reviews, and collaboration discussions during this quarter:
“Communities of Practice Enabled By Technology” Workshop, part of an NSF-sponsored Cyberlearning Workshop series March 24-25 Arlington, VA - Jim Myers was invited to attend this meeting, which was part of a series outlining the vision for use of cyberinfrastructure in the learning and digital library communities.
High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC) Conference Program Committee, March 31-April 1, 2005, Atlanta, GA - Jim Myers participated as a member of the HPDC Program Committee in determining the paper selection for the HPDC 14 conference.
Bootstrapping to a Semantic Grid Jens Schwidder, Tara Talbott, James Myers, Proceedings of the Semantic Infrastructure for Grid Computing Applications Workshop (SIGAW), at IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGRID) 2005, May 9-12, 2005, Cardiff, UK
Adapting the Electronic Laboratory Notebook for the Semantic Era Tara Talbott, Michael Peterson, Jens Schwidder, James D. Myers, Proceedings of the 2005 International Symposium on Collaborative Technologies and Systems (CTS 2005), May 15-20, 2005, St. Louis, MO
Life Science Research Practice: A Revolution in Progress, Jim Myers, Ron Taylor, Yuri Gorby, Debbie Gracio, whitepaper submitted as supporting documentation for the Opportunities for Distributed Science: A National Collaboratories Program Workshop, December 1-3, 2004, Boulder, CO
Collaborative Multi-scale Combustion Science Larry A. Rahn, James D. Myers, whitepaper submitted as supporting documentation for the Opportunities for Distributed Science: A National Collaboratories Program Workshop, December 1-3, 2004, Boulder, CO
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.
Mid-America Earthquake (MAE) Center: Jim Myers is advising the MAE Center on the development of an Earthquake Engineering-related decision support system incorporating NEESGrid and Collaboratory technologies.
Web Downloads Registrations to download SAM and notebook software are continuing at a pace of 1-2 per day.