DIALOGUE: BMI to partner with UK National e-Science Centre on DIALOGUE project
Thursday 01/06/2005
August 2005 Workshop registration and information »
BMI and other institutions in the US and Europe have been awarded funds through the United Kingdom's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to support future collaborative efforts on the National e-Science Centre's (NeSC) DIALOGUE project.
DIALOGUE—Data Integration Applications: Linking Organizations to Gain Understanding and Experience—will create a ground for international workshops, inter-site visits, and research sharing to realize broad standards and interoperating core software toolkits designed to enable global data access and integration (DAI). DIALOGUE represents a major international effort to push DAI tools and standards into new territory, envisioning more ambitious data integration architectures, well-adapted for semantic grids, simulation, analysis, data mining, and visualization.
March 2005 has been tentatively set as the start date for DIALOGUE.
The NeSC's key software product is OGSA-DAI, a kit of services, libraries, and tools that facilitate development of services for accessing, fetching, updating, tranforming, and integrating data located across heterogeneous computing environments. Building on the success of OGSA-DAI, which is now in its fifth release, DIALOGUE will engage with other projects that are pioneering other and cognate aspects of DAI.
DIALOGUE will involve BMI's major Grid projects—DataCutter, STORM, and Mobius. Projects at the University of Indiana, UCSD, and the University of Vienna, Austria, will also contribute to the DIALOGUE effort. Research teams from these institutions and e-Science in Edinburgh will hold a number of week-long workshops and inter-site meetings at Ohio State and in Edinburgh.
The workshops will develop a common conceptual system for discussing DAI across the range of interests of the participants and will jointly develop and agree upon a software framework to support flexible aggregations of each group's DAI software systems.
DIALOGUE will also foster development of technical reports to capture, develop, share, and publish the innovations and understandings that arise, in order to incrementally produce a roadmap for future DAI development and provide accessible input to future projects and standards. The long-range goal is to bring together researchers and developers from these projects to create a framework that composes the range of their complementary technologies and research efforts in order to make these readily available to other researchers and scientific organizations world-wide.
The programme for DIALOGUE will involve frameworks for high-level data description to support better automation of DAI, models for data and computation management, ways to automate responses to structural changes in the linkages between data resources, and discussion of how to architect security models for DAI, among other topics.
The DIALOGUE funds currently provide support for three international workshops and four inter-site technical visits. BMI's Joel Saltz will chair the Ohio State workshop and and NeSC's Malcolm Atkinson will chair the Edinburgh workshops.
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