Shaping the efuture

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Shaping the e-future? Grids, Web Services and
Digital Libraries
Professor Tony Hey, Director UK e-Science
Programme Dr Liz Lyon, Director
UKOLN International JISC/CNI Conference
June 2002, Edinburgh, UK
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Part 2 Joining up the thinking

• Web Services the Information Environment
• Unpacking the components
• Infrastructure services registries
• Semantics and knowledge technologies
• Re-applying Grid concepts
• Service management autonomic computing,
  e-Utilities
• A new, broader, integrated vision?

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The JISC Information Environment

• build an on-line information environment
  providing secure and convenient access to a
  comprehensive collection of scholarly and
  educational material
• JISC Strategy 2001-2005
• Technical Architecture Study May 2001
• http//www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/dner/ar
  ch/dner-arch.html
• Content providers, shared services, brokers
  aggregators, portals
• Discover searching (Z39.50), sharing (OAI-PMH),
  alerting (RSS)
• Access resolver (OpenURL), institutional
  profiles

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Web Services

• Business models
• Application to application, B2C to B2B, m2m
• Global take-up
• Google Web Services APIs
• Campus services integration at UC Berkeley
• UK e-Government Interoperability Framework
  (e-GIF) Vs 4.0
• Support organisations
• World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Services
  Activity http//www.w3.org/2002/ws/
• Web Services Interoperability Working Group
  (WS-I) http//www.ws-i.org/

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Web Services standards

• WSDL Web Services Description Language
  http//www.w3.org/TR/wsdl
• descriptions of Web Services
• UDDI Universal Discovery, Description
  Integration http//www.uddi.org/spec
  ification.html
• registries containing service descriptions
• SOAP Simple Object Access Protocol
  http//www.w3.org/TR/SOAP/
• transport protocol for communication between Web
  Services
• Emerging standards WSRP, WSIA, WSXL.

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IBM Web Services model
Service provider

WSDL SOAP
WSDL UDDI
Publish
Bind
Service requestor
Service registry
Find
WSDL UDDI
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JISC IE Web Services mapping
Content providers, aggregators, brokers, shared
services

Service provider
Publish
Bind
Collection description service and Service
description service IE service registry?
Portals, aggregators, brokers
Service registry
Service requestor
Find
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The JISC Information Environment and Web Services
Andy Powell and Liz Lyon http//www.ariadne.ac.uk
/issue31/information-environments/
Content providers, aggregators, brokers, shared
services

Service provider
Publish
Bind
Collection description service and Service
description service IE service registry?
Portals, aggregators, brokers
Service registry
Service requestor
Find
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Service Registries

• UDDI Web Service standard
• Global public registry
• Private registries
• JISC Information Environment registry
• Grid Service registry
• Service type
• Service instance
• Functionality
• Registries are dynamic services
• Implement searching across multiple registries
• New Web Services compliant products ?

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Metadata Schema Registries

• CORES http//www.cores-eu.net/
  a forum on shared metadata
  vocabularies.
• Standards Interoperability Forum in November
• A Metadata Registry for the Semantic Web
  Rachel Heery (UKOLN)
  Harry Wagner (OCLC) D-Lib May 2002
• Metadata for Education Group (MEG)
  http//www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/education/regproj/
  
• Demo of registry at Workshop in September
• 2nd Joint UKOLN / NeSC workshop Autumn 2002
• focussing on exchange of practical experience

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Semantic Web architecture Tim
Berners-Leehttp//www.w3.org/2000/Talks/1206-xml2
k-tbl/slide10-0.html
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Ontologies and semantics

• Semantic Web vision a shared understanding of
  the meaning of descriptions of digital content
  (human, m2m)
• An ontology defines the terms used to describe
  and represent an area of knowledge
• classes of things
• relationships between things
• properties (attributes) of things
• Semantic Web and Web Services are complementary
• WWW and Web Services based on XML
• Semantic Web based on ontology languages e.g.
  RDF, DAMLOIL
• New Web ontology languages under development
  e.g. DAML-Services, Ontology Web Language (OWL)
  
• http//www.w3.org/2001/sw/WebOnt/

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Knowledge and Web mining

• The application of data mining techniques to the
  content, structure and usage of Web resources
• Usage mining e.g. Amazon personal recommendations
  (note privacy issues!)
• Structure mining e.g. RDN-WSE project
  http//ilrt.org/discovery/2002/01/wse-rdn/
• Content mining (data) e.g. AstroGrid developing a
  virtual observatory to support exploitation of
  key astronomical datasets http//www.astrogrid.or
  g/

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Grid Services

• Persistent services e.g. a data repository
• Transient service instances which are dynamically
  created through a Factory interface and have a
  specified lifetime
  e.g. a distributed data mining service
• How can we apply Web mining techniques to DL
  resources ?
• Pattern analysis of multiple distributed video
  streams
• Textual analysis of virtual collections of
  archival documents

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Collaborative environments

• Distributed scientific collaboration
• Collaborative Advanced Knowledge Technologies in
  the Grid (CoAKTinG) http//www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/proje
  ct/akt/coakting/
• Smart spaces
• Ontologically annotated audio/video streams
• Describing presence
• How can we apply research experience to Learning
  Teaching environments ?
• Tutor/student/group interaction in a VLE

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Computing (e-)Utilities

• Computing on-demand
• Storage on-demand
• Applications on-demand
• Application Service Providers (ASPs)
• Which digital library functions should we
  outsource to improve efficiency ?
• Preservation and curation services
• Resolver services
• Data / learning resource repositories

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Autonomic computing

• Technology needs to manage itself
  Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM
• Manifesto Paul Horn, IBM http//www.research.
  ibm.com/autonomic/manifesto/autonomic_computing.pd
  f
• 8 key elements e.g.
• Self-optimising
• Self-configuration
• Self-healing
• Self-protecting
• Should we apply this approach to digital
  libraries?
• Improve performance by intelligent selection of
  targets for search requests based on response
  times

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The e-future?
Digital Libraries Persistent
Data
Information
Semantic Web Knowledge
Web Services Transactional
Grids Transient
Business
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Questions?