Transcript Service - euroCRIS

CRIS architecture to
support an ERA
Brian Matthews
Brian Matthews, euroCRIS, 18/09/03
Objective
• To support an Integrated European RTD
Information System .
• Needs to support:
– Researchers,
– exploiters and
– decision makers
• And needs to be:
–
–
–
–
Robust
Easy to use
Extensible
“future proof”
Brian Matthews, euroCRIS, 18/09/03
Key Principles
• Certain general principles should
underpin this.
– Institutional Independence
– Common exchange formats
– Distributed control
– Multilinguality
– Easy to use tools
• Can provide access as a Service
Brian Matthews, euroCRIS, 18/09/03
Institution Independence
• Institutions should be able to maintain
their own research information
• Institutions keep ownership and can use
the information for their own needs.
• Institutions should be able to use their
own internal formats and internal
information systems (DB and OS
independence).
• Without these, institutional buy-in will be
hard.
Brian Matthews, euroCRIS, 18/09/03
Common Exchange Formats
• A common exchange format
(ontology) for expressing data
(CERIF)
• Common APIs onto the local
CRIS’s for query and return of
information.
• Local formats related to the
common format by well-defined
mappings.
Brian Matthews, euroCRIS, 18/09/03
Distributed Control
• Loose coupling between institutions
• No overall administration
• Collection of information at node
points for efficiency
• Periodic update and mirroring
• Single point of authentication
Brian Matthews, euroCRIS, 18/09/03
Multilinguality
• Vital in a European (and wider)
context.
• Multilingual thesauri
• Multilingual interfaces
• Multilingual querying and response.
Brian Matthews, euroCRIS, 18/09/03
Easy to use tools
• Don’t demand unfamiliar tools and
interfaces upon users
• Based around a standard web
architecture
• Use Browsers as the Front-end.
Brian Matthews, euroCRIS, 18/09/03
Integration with other repositories
• As a service component it should allow
access to other repositories
– Library and publication archives
– Data archives
– “Grid Portals”
• Mediate and control combination of
services
• An active component in the GRID.
• Need to coordinate with other
communities
– Common metadata
– Common Interfaces
– Common digital
curation problems.
Brian Matthews, euroCRIS, 18/09/03
Key Technologies
• Preference for Web technologies
– “open” development
– Widely available and supported
– Open source implementations
• Should also prepare for integration
into the GRID
Brian Matthews, euroCRIS, 18/09/03
Key Technologies
• Basic Web
technologies:
– http, HTML, CSS
• Fundamental
exchange
mechanism:
• Knowledge
representation and
modelling:
– RDF, RDF Schema,
DAML+OIL (WebOnt)
– XML, XSLT, XML Schema
• Component
interfaces:
• Generic Querying
system:
– XML Query? (XSQL?,
RQL?)
– Web Services (SOAP,
WDSL, UDDI?, XACML?,
SAML?)
• Programming layer:
– Java and Java Servlets
• User Preferences
– P3P, CC/PP
Brian Matthews, euroCRIS, 18/09/03
Strawman Architecture
ERIS
broker
Users
Local
data
cache
ERIS portal
Directory
service
Access
control
service
Common
metadata
User
service
CRIS Service
XML Query over http
Web Service wrapper
WS wrapper
WS wrapper
WS wrapper
WS wrapper
Specific
metadata
Specific
metadata
Specific
metadata
Specific
metadata
Specific
metadata
Raw
data
Raw
data
Raw
data
Raw
data
Brian Matthews, euroCRIS, 18/09/03
Raw
data
Components
• Broker
–
–
–
–
–
–
Directory Service
Metadata Service
Query Service
Results Service
User Service
Access control service
• Distributed query across HTTP
• Web Service front-end to local CRIS
– Xml wrapper to produce the right data.
Brian Matthews, euroCRIS, 18/09/03
From here?
• Service architecture proposed
• Amalgamate results from different
CRIS systems
• Common exchange format – and
Ontologies
• Common Thesaurus?
• Local Caching of results?
• A P2P hierarchy?
Brian Matthews, euroCRIS, 18/09/03
ERCIM
• 15 research institutes in
mathematics, comp sci and IT
• Wide spread across Europe
• Well connected to science and
tech, academia, govnt, industry
• A pool of expertise
Brian Matthews, euroCRIS, 18/09/03