The NERC DataGrid services

Abstract

This short paper outlines the key components of the NERC DataGrid: a discovery service, a vocabulary service and a software stack deployed both centrally to provide a data discovery portal, and at data providers to provide local portals and data and metadata services.

Information in environmental data grids

“…The latter shows the characteristics of the ragged section type, which was designed to support the sort of data obtained by ships dropping multiple casts of instrument(s) to varying depths during a cruise. The nature of the functional affordances is clear: these are the meaningful subselections one can carry out on a ragged section, and they support the subselections offered by the services described in Latham et al (2009).…”

“…In both cases, management of vocabularies is dealt with by communities with well-established procedures. The vocabularies, along with ontological mappings between them, are deployed as a service (see Latham et al 2009). The explicit managed ontology, along with the individual ontologies encoded within MOLES documents together form the O-metadata, which is key to traversing between discipline descriptions.…”

The environmental eScience revolution

“…The challenge will be to migrate this interesting development into the wider environmental community, and allow it to evolve based on how users actually use the system. Latham et al (2009) describe some of the developments in more detail, including how the search vocabulary was developed.…”

Merging Grid Technologies

“…The web interfaces are divided into two types: data browsing/exploration and data processing/qualification. The first group includes: * dbviewer 14 -the metadata database interface which allows to browse and query all attributes of all persistent data classes stored in the system, * quick data search 15 -allows to query on a limited subset of attributes of the data model (coordinate range and object name), and provides results of all projects in the database, * image cut out service 16 and color image maker 17 -these two services are for the astronomical image data type and allows to create a cut out of the image or to create a pseudocolor RGB image from three different images of the same part of the sky, Fig. 7 The GMap interface with M31 image from GoogleSky and images stored and processed in Astro-WISE available for this part of sky * GMap 18 -exploration tool of the Astro-WISE system using the GoogleSky interface (Beta, see Fig.…”

“…When we started looking, we were not able to find a complete enough and easy to use implementation. The most promising solution was a NDG Security development 35 [15] within the OMII-UK 36 and the NERC Data Grid 37 [16] projects. When we reconsidered this solution recently it was found to be much more mature and we now plan to integrate their MyProxyClient 38 into Astro-WISE.…”