Brian Matthews, CRIS 2002, 30/08/02

ERIS Workshop, CRIS2002Architecture

Brian Matthews,Business & Information Technology Dept, CLRC

b.m.matthews@rl.ac.uk

Brian Matthews, CRIS 2002, 30/08/02

Introduction

• Early stage proposal• Objectives• Establish key principles behind an

architecture• Establish key technologies behind an

architecture• Strawman architecture• Summary and open questions.

Brian Matthews, CRIS 2002, 30/08/02

Objective

• To design and build an architecture to support an Integrated European RTD Information System (ERIS).

• The ERIS needs to support:– Researchers, – exploiters and – decision makers

• And needs to be:– Robust– Easy to use – Extensible– “future proof”

Brian Matthews, CRIS 2002, 30/08/02

Key Principles

• Certain general principles should underpin the architecture.– Institutional Independence– Common exchange formats– Distributed control– Multilinguality– Easy to use tools

Brian Matthews, CRIS 2002, 30/08/02

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, CRIS 2002, 30/08/02

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, CRIS 2002, 30/08/02

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, CRIS 2002, 30/08/02

Multilinguality

• Vital in a European (and wider) context.• Multilingual thesauri• Multilingual interfaces• Multilingual querying and response.

Brian Matthews, CRIS 2002, 30/08/02

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, CRIS 2002, 30/08/02

Key Technologies

• Preference for Web technologies – “open” development– Widely available and supported– Open source implementations

• Should also take note of GRID

Brian Matthews, CRIS 2002, 30/08/02

Key Technologies

• Basic Web technologies: – http, HTML, CSS

• Fundamental exchange mechanism: – XML, XSLT, XML Schema

• Component interfaces: – Web Services (SOAP,

WDSL, UDDI?, XACML?, SAML?)

• User Preferences– P3P, CC/PP

• Knowledge representation and modelling: – RDF, RDF Schema,

DAML+OIL (WebOnt)

• Generic Querying system: – XML Query? (XSQL?,

RQL?)

• Programming layer: – Java and Java Servlets

Brian Matthews, CRIS 2002, 30/08/02

Strawman Architecture

Common metadata

Specific metadata

Raw data

Raw data

Specific metadata

Raw data

Raw data

Specific metadata

Raw data

Users

Web Service wrapper WS wrapper WS wrapper WS wrapper

XML Query over http

ERIS broker

CRIS Service

WS wrapper

Directory service

Specific metadata

Specific metadata

Access control service

User service

ERIS portalLocal datacache

Brian Matthews, CRIS 2002, 30/08/02

Components

• ERIS 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, CRIS 2002, 30/08/02

From here?

• Service architecture proposed• Amalgamate results from different CRIS

systems• Common exchange format – and Ontology• Common Thesaurus?• Local Caching of results?• A P2P hierarchy?