JISC

Summary

This project will stabilise an Eclipse-based Workbench tool as a data-intensive workflow-development environment for OGSA-DAI, with the express intention of attracting a wider user base to OGSA-DAI and its applications in data-intensive computing.

OGSA-DAI is a powerful, robust, stable open-source platform for Internet-scale data integration, providing a toolkit of services and data-processing elements to integrate information from heterogeneous, distributed data sources.  The EU Framework 7 ADMIRE project has developed novel approaches to Internet-scale knowledge discovery, with a powerful data workflow enactment platform built on OGSA-DAI.  One of ADMIRE’s principal results is DISPEL, the data-intensive systems process engineering language, a Java-like language for describing streaming data workflows.  Writing DISPEL workflows requires a good degree of programming knowledge and to complement this ADMIRE has produced a visual Workbench based on the Eclipse tools platform.  The Workbench allows users to drag and drop processing elements from palettes and connect them together to form workflows, building complex patterns from simple components.

Our target beneficiaries are researchers increasingly involved in working with digital data and other digital artefacts who are looking for more powerful yet easy-to-use tools to assist them in their research.  For them, the benefits of this work will be twofold:

1. It will radically improve the ease with which researchers can develop data-intensive workflows for research, exploration and knowledge discovery on the OGSA-DAI platform;
2. It will provide a clear learnability ramp for those researchers wanting to adopt a powerful new data-intensive research tool (the DISPEL language) from a familiar environment (the Eclipse platform).

Objectives

Our objectives are to:

1. Provide researchers with an easy-to-use tool for creating data-intensive workflows using OGSA-DAI;
2. Introduce researchers to the more powerful capabilities of the DISPEL data-intensive programming language.

Anticipated Outputs and Outcomes

The outputs will be:

1. OGSA-DAI Workbench source code (SourceForge, Apache 2 licence);
2. A desktop virtual machine image: “Workbench-in-a-box”;
3. A “Getting Started” guide with example workflows;
4. A website and blog.