Science Library Pad

The Agenda on Microhoo and the Compute Cloud

The Agenda had their somewhat-usual technology suspects on talking about the Microsoft-Yahoo merger, with a majority of the show devoted to the idea of the "compute cloud" future for computing.  It's quite impressive that they took this fairly technical topic on, and they did a good job of covering it from various angles.

The Debate: The Coming Cloud (switch to the Mark Evans tab for the other discussion) - video is linked from these pages, just click on "Watch video" there

also available as iTunes audio and video - I'm npt seeing it in iTunes yet though

Overall I liked the show, but I would have liked to have seen a cloud computing user, rather than just a panel of pundits.  Show me someone who has moved their enterprise over to Amazon EC2/S3 or other cloud services.  (For example, Internet Archive has been experimenting with this... and I see I'm the top hit for this information: "Science Library Pad: Internet Archive 20th Century Search".  Also SmugMug photos uses Amazon S3 storage.)

I think the future splits into multiple models of computer use.  Gamers, for near-term, need local graphics engines and local storage (holding the multi-gigabyte virtual environments they use).  The intensive computer users like me probably still have their whole elaborate local network and local storage and local computing... well, basically entire personal data centre.  We're probably the only ones left with a lot of non-cloud data and computing.

The digital dividers (old people, poor people, the technically unsavvy) will have very simple devices, something very akin to thin clients - probably in many different form factors - built in to televisions, set-top boxes, things like OLPCs and Eee PCs, "intelligent LCD displays".  The highly mobile will have quite sophisticated but completely mobile devices.  All of the data for both groups lives in the cloud.

This being said, there is a very, very long history predicting the demise of the PC and its replacement with set-tops and thin clients, and it has yet to materialize.  People use a bunch of devices (cell, camera, PDA, laptop) AND their home computers, not instead of their computers.

SIDEBAR: Jesse Hirsh had quite the slag on for the Preventers of Information Services in IT Departments.
First he says home users can't be trusted with personal computers, and then he says work users must be trusted with unlimited use of Internet applications.

It is true that some of the Dr. No aspect of IT is arbitrary, but some of it is either out of their control (layers of regulations imposed from on high), and some of it is related to user support.  IT is about user productivity.  Computer secure, applications running smoothly = happy IT.  If this could be guaranteed through the magic of trusted cloud computing, that would be fine.  But the reality is, users download a bunch of cr*p and access a bunch of cr*p websites, and then IT has to come in and try to clean it up.  That's why IT tries to lockdown.  Lockdown is about being able to guarantee a stable computer, network, and sustainable support experience.

If you want to see what happens in an uncontrolled environment, just let a bunch of consultants into your organisation and let them "manage themselves" and see how well that works...

LimeWire led to data breach: N.L. justice minister

an outside consultant had installed LimeWire, a popular program used to swap music for free, on a laptop computer that was being used to work with data for the Workplace Health, Safety and Compensation Commission.

As a result, information — including names, addresses, dates of birth and medical and work histories — related to 153 individuals was exposed

END SIDEBAR

SIDEBAR 2: A minor quibble with terminology used during the show, Amazon's S3 is cloud storage only, their compute cloud service is EC2.  END SIDEBAR

some e-science events in 2007

3rd IEEE International Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing
Bangalore, India, December 10-13, 2007
CFP deadline: Papers due July 15, 2007

Enabling Grids for E-sciencE - EGEE'07 - will take place 1-5 October 2007 at the Europe Congress Center (ECC), Budapest, Hungary
(mostly about grids)

Sixth UK e-Science All Hands Meeting (AHM 2007), 10th - 13th September 2007 Nottingham
deadline for submission of mini-workshop proposals is 22nd January 2007

German e-Science Conference 2007 (GES2007)
2nd-4th of May 2007 in the city of Baden-Baden
CFP deadline was January 1, 2007

Spanish Conference on e-Science Grid Computing
1st and 2nd March 2007 in Madrid
CFP deadline was 4th December 2006

Norway - National Arena in eScience, 2007-2010

To foster collaboration between researchers in eScience, the Research Council of Norway has established an annual meeting series as part of the eVITA programme.

Norway - eScience Meeting 2007 - January 29-30, 2007 at Dr. Holms Hotel, Geilo

Amazon Computing Cloud - for academics?

Declan Butler has an article in Nature (behind the paywall) about researchers using Amazon's compute services

The service is still in a test phase, so few scientists have even heard of it yet, let alone tried it. But it is a movement that experts believe could revolutionize how researchers use computers. In future, they will export computing jobs to industry networks rather than trying to run them in-house, says Alberto Pace, head of Internet services at CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory near Geneva. CERN has built the world's largest scientific computing grid, bringing together 10,000 computers in 31 countries to handle the 1.5 gigabytes of data that its new accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, will churn out every second once it is switched on next year.

"I see no reason why the Amazon service wouldn't take off," Pace says. "For a lab that wants to go fast and cheaply, this is a huge advantage over buying material and hiring IT staff. You spend a few dollars, you have a computer farm and you get results."

[Dutch computer scientist Rudi] Cilibrasi, a researcher at the National Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam, was using Amazon's service to test an algorithm aimed at predicting how much someone will like a movie based on their current preferences. He says he is a convert: "It's substantially more reliable, cheaper and easier to use [than academic computing networks]. It opens up powerful computing-on-demand to the masses."

Amazon puts network power online
Nature 444, 528 (30 November 2006) | doi:10.1038/444528a; Published online 29 November 2006

He emphasizes in particular the new capabilities enabled by virtualization.

via Declan's blog

Previously:
August 24, 2006  Amazon EC2: the AmazoGrid

ECDL 2006 - DLSci06 - DILIGENT grid-based DL

Leonardo Candela, Donatella Castelli, Christoph Langguth, Pasquale Pagano, Heiko Schuldt, Manuele Simi and Laura Voicu
On-Demand Service Deployment and Process Support in e-Science DLs: the DILIGENT Experience

http://www.diligentproject.org/

(Also see notes from tutorial Distributed Infrastructures for Digital Libraries.)

Motivation

* research is multidisciplinary and co-operative effort
* may use a virtual resource organization that doesn't last a long time or have DL expertise
* but the DL is an important tool

DELOS view: from DL to Knowledge Commons
* from content-centric to person-centric
* from info storage to communication and collaboration support
* from centrally-located text to distributed and heterogenous data sources

New DL development model
* DL built by dynamically aggregating the needed resources
* new functionality combined in user-defined workflows

Service-Oriented Architecture over Grid Framework

[complex diagram]

* New functionality delivered by workflows of services

Services Overview

* Mediation
* Information Space Management
* Access
* User and Resource Management
* Presentation
  - user-oriented access point to the DL
  - plug and play community-specific tools
  - [something about JSR168 portlets and other stuff]
* Enabling
  - monitoring, other operations domain functions

Service Detail

* the Keeper Service
  - deploy and monitor user-defined virtual DLs

* the Information Service
  - gathers, stores and supplies information about the resources constituting DILIGENT
    and needed to the other services
  - XML-based resource profiles
  - push and pull modalities i.e. query and subscribe/notify

Process Design and Validation

Implement complex services by combining existing ones, a.k.a. "programming in the large"
* control flow
* data flow
* transaction behavior and execution guartees for concurrency and failure handling
* XML, SOAP and WSDL as technologies
* BPEL as a foundation for process specification

[diagram of tool]

Process Execution

* built on top of OSIRIS
* runs BPEL tasks?

ECDL 2006 - tutorial - Distributed Infrastructures for Digital Libraries

Sunday September 17, 2006
09:30
Tutorial 4
Distributed Infrastructures for Digital Libraries

I liked this workshop a lot, I hadn't really thought about DLs in relationship to P2P and Grid, and I liked the idea that it may be possible to use aspects of all of them.

[raw presentation notes]

Start

Digital library mediates between community and content.

* Core functionality of a DL is well-understood
* Standards have been estabished
* DL management systems are in operation e.g. DSpace, OpenDLib

Evolution of DL

* wider clientele including scientific collaboration
* competing technologies including web search engines
* technology change: grid, p2p, SOA, Semantic Web
* new types of content including blogs, dynamic content, scientific data

Scenario 1 - identifying archeological [] discoveries made by the public
* traditional way is very complex and time-consuming for the archeologist []

Scenario 2 - Environmental Incidents
* can you set up a virtual DL on demand, including all needed data and simulations?

Next Gen DL (NGDL)
* dynamic configurable federation

The future of DLs - services

Specialized services
* Search
  - Different media types
  - Content-based
  - Multi-object, multi-feature
  - Multilingual access
  - Relevance feedback
* Indexing
* Annotation
* Metadata management
* Content management
* Resource management

Requirements:

Virtual DL
* Easy to extend
* Example: collaboration in eScience applications

Management of services which are:
* Distributed
* Heterogenous
* [?]

Composition of services
* Defining complex services / processes / workflows
* Flexibility
* Example: complex processes for automated storage and replication of data, generation of meta data (content features)

More
* Personalization
* Visualization
* Access on mobile devices
* Context- and location-aware services
* AuthN an AuthZ
* "High availability" [quotes mine] - Access anytime - replication
* Reliability
* Scalability
* etc-ability [my comment]
* Dynamic / Continuously generated data
  - example: data generated by certain instruments in eScience

Q (me): How / where to work on standarding service interfaces, so that we can
incorporate them into workflows?

A: will be covered in Web Services presentation

Underlying Technologies and their Promises
Thomas Risse ?

Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA)

Web Service Model

Service Provider publishes service description to Service Broker
Service Requestor requests service list from Service Broker
Service Requester then binds to Service Provider

Elements of SOA

[diagram I don't agree with]

Web Services Stack

[diagram]

WS-BPEL "already widely used, lots of applications"

* Above BPEL - Coordination (WS-Coordination, WS-AtomicTransaction, WS-Notification...) [not mature]
* Security
* Management (WSDM)
* Contracting (trading partner agreement - paper contract)

Challenge: Semantic standards are still in development

Grid Computing: An Application of SOA

Software: Globus Toolkit...

[Globus architecture diagram]

which leads to... Open Grid Service Architecture (OGSA)

Idea: Service orientation to virtualize resources
* Extended Web Services -> Grid Services - Web Service Resource Framework (WSRF)

[OGSA Architecture diagram]

WSRF

* Unified way to model and interact with stateful Web Services

Peer-to-Peer Computing

Summary

== ==

[Overview of Motivation and the three projects]

Web Services and Distributed DL Infrastructures

Challenges
* granularity of services
* Semantics of services

BRICKS, Diligent and DELOS

BRICKS
* transparent access to distributed available information sources
* retrieval of info with knowledge support
* multi-lingual
* easy
* platform independent

BRICKS Approach

* SOA
* Decentralized
* Open Source

BRICKS Node (BNode)

P2P network of BNodes

Budget: 12.2 million Euros
project nearing completion ?
http://www.brickscommunity.org/

The Diligent Project

Diligent develops a DL test-bed infrastructure that allows virtual organizations to create
on-demand DL including computing, storage, multi-content support, app resources.

use a grid computing infrastructure for resource allocation

Key Concepts

* SOA
* Integrating DL services on infrastructure from Enabling Grids for E-sciencE project (EGEE)
* Enhances existing grid services with complex service interactions required to build, operate and
  maintain transient virtual digital libraries

Diligent Architecture

[diagram]

Budget: 9.55 million Euros
http://www.diligentproject.org/

The DELOS Project

Network of Excellence to coordinate the development of next generation digital libraries.

[huge project]

* Reference Model for DLs
* Architectures

Delos DLMS

* Specialized DL functionality from DELOS and non-DELOS partners is made available and integrated by means
  of (Web) services

OSIRIS: Integration of Services

http://www.delos.info/

Q (me): So there are three frameworks, which one do I use?  All three?
A: Err, yes.  Still in early stages.

== left ==

There was info on how the systems do content and metadata management, while
I was at another tutorial.

== back ==

BRICKS

* Personalization

User profiles add customization on top of e.g. Content, Presentation, Services, Interaction.

Model the User

* many aspects
  - will focus on preferences

[a lot of details about how to capture user interest in e.g. keywords and their relationships]

Pesonalization Approaches

Recommenders: Content-based Recommenders

- "find me things that are related to things I have liked in the past"

Recommenders: Collaborative Filtering

- find objects similar PEOPLE have liked

What BRICK? provides is Personalized Search

e.g. Java = coffee vs. Java = programming language

Architecture

Query -> Query Personalization -> Result Ranking

Query Personalization

* dynamic enhancement of query using preferences from a user profile

Personalization in BRICKS

[diagram of Personalization Manager interacting with many foundational bricks]

User Model

* Term preferencecs (e.g. Pisa)
* Physical collection
* Ontology classses
* Attribute (e.g. author="Plato")

All with vectors of terms.

User Profiling

* Transparent user-action tracking and profile update

Currently support

* query personalization
* results ranking

Profiles are local and all processing is local.
The profiles are not distributed.  (Eventually they will be.)

DELOS Search [and Annotations]

* Image similarity
* Audio retrieval
* Video retrieval
* 3D retrieval

Visualization and Interfaces

Collections, Annotations, Personalization and Search in DILIGENT

* Collection is the ultimate source for search
* Physical and Virtual collections (virtual - constructed by query)

Personalization

* Manage and maintain user profiles
* Query personalization

currently there is only manual assignment of profiles,
eventually there will be user behavior tracking

The DILIGENT Search Engine

* Composed by a distributed set of services communicating via WS-* protocols being
  orchestrated under a master component

... [lots of detail]

Query execution plans are ultimately converted to Process Execution Engine (PES) compliant
workflows (BPEL4WS).

Workflow is submitted to PES

[very complex queries are supported]

Lessons Learned

* big complex subject with ongoing investigations'

General Methodology Lessons

* Communication of the concept of distributed architectures to the end user is a hard process
* Early prototyping is helpful
* All three technologies (SOA, P2P, Grid) and their implementations are still evolving
* Developers and system designers have
  - a long learning curve
  - difficulties in implementing a DL on top of these three technologies

When you work with librarians, they can't dream hard enough = they don't know what is possible.
Technologies have to work hard with librarians to make them understand what can be done.

General Tech Lessons

* The three technologies are not orthogonal
* All three are relevant to future DLs
* No tech can meet the requirements of a DL alone
* But you don't need all technologies always for everything - select as appropriate

Specific Tech Lessons - SOA

* Important
  - functionality can be combined across network borders
* A service-oriented design is different from traditional design
  - e.g. the number of functions should be limited, due to [various] considerations
  - service invocations are NOT like LAN remote procedure calls
* Communication costs between services are often underestimated

Tech Lessons - P2P

* Beneficial when you have a lot of data
  - supports redudancy
* Increased complexity in content security, access control, ...

Tech Lessons - Grid

* It gives you high computing power
* Critical for supporting computationally-intensive tasks
* Beneficial when you have a lot of data
  - supports redudancy
* Not really targetting interactive or real-time applications but rather batch,
  long-running processing tasks
* Fine-grained security complicates planning query execution
* (Provides a) standardized mechanism for on-the-spot processing and exchanging large
  amounts of XML data
* Despite its current shortcomings, WSRF offers an elegant substrate for building
  a dynamic distributed system based on standards
* Failure to carefully plan complex workflows ... might lead to ... execution failures
* Porting database concepts and workflow to DLs opens opportunities for distributed information retrieval

[presented by Yannis from University of Athens]

Conclusions and Open Issues

Currently...

[diagram of current digital library silos]

Content-centric, static storage, isolated, environment-specific, isolated and repeated efforts

Myths

DL for library only
DL for cultural heritage only

Future Development Methodology

[diagram of shared generic DL stuff]

* Generic DLMS tech to build on

Future DL

* Person-centric
* Targeted fr active communication/collaboration
* Global distributed interacting systems
* Generic DLMS to build on
* "All" applications (not just libraries and cultural heritage)

Develop from top-down, from the user interface / user requirements down
Interop between DLs

Conclusions

* Still early in the game
* These systems can serve as first versions / early protoypes - they are not ready for industrial production

Open Issues

* Grand unified theory of SOA, P2P and Grid
* Grand unification of BRICKS, Delos, DILIGENT...
* Standards
* Tons of research issues
  - distributed search and workflow optimization
  - distributed information fusion
  - intelligent caching of information and processing state
  - intelligent placement and replication of information and processing
  - ...

* two more projects
  - BELIEF - how to exploit "knowledge infrastructure"
  - DRIVER - distributed access to international repositories

Previously:
January 15, 2005  DELOS - digital library architecture

new opportunities for your library - Ticer presentations

Many interesting presentations available from Ticer's Digital Libraries a la Carte, New Choices for the Future 2006.

Check the programme or the abstracts.

They all look interesting, but here are a couple particularly aligned with my interests:

• Grids & e-Science: UK Experience & Their Potential to Impact Libraries, PowerPoint presentation as PPT file (7 MB) or as PDF file (4 MB), Dr. David Berry
  Note: It's entirely about grid and e-science, you'll have to figure out how it impacts your library for yourself.  The e-science cycle diagram on slide 10 is nice.
• Aiming for New Levels of Cross-Repository Functionality, PowerPoint presentation as PDF file (774kB), Herbert Van de Sompel

via DigiCMB

Amazon EC2: the AmazoGrid

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Just as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) enables storage in the cloud, Amazon EC2 enables "compute" in the cloud.

Each instance predictably provides the equivalent of a system with a 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth.

Pricing

    * Pay only for what you use.
    * $0.10 per instance-hour consumed (or part of an hour consumed).
    * $0.20 per GB of data transferred outside of Amazon (i.e., Internet traffic).
    * $0.15 per GB-Month of Amazon S3 storage used for your images (charged by Amazon S3).

Data transferred within the Amazon EC2 environment, or between Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3, is free of charge (i.e., $0.00 per GB).

That's pretty cool.  Away with the server room?
No more physical space limitations, no more cooling limits, no more power limits.
(Of course I do wonder - Amazon's electricity, is it green, or does every megaflop add megacarbon from US coal-fired power plants?)

Jon Udell has, of course, already tried it: Amazon EC2: Wow!

via Slashdot Amazon Betas 'Elastic' Grid Computing Service /.

Euro Fedora User Meeting 2005 - Fedora as an OAI-PMH (and WS) Compliant Data Provider

Fedora as an OAI-PMH (and WS) Compliant Data Provider (PowerPoint)
Ana Macario, Alfred Wegener Institute

* very data-centric organization
* involved in DataGrid

* SOA at AWI
[diagram of 2004]

In practice...
post-print -> repository
PI is supposed to release data when published, but by then, it is lost or there are excuses

So need Staging -> Publication

So: Fedora to do all this.

* Reasons for Fedora
- Virtual Repository
- not restricted to Dublin Core
- standards compliant
- etc.

[diagram of 2005]

currently using dc.source and dc.relation as a hack to express linkages,
convinced that proper way to do this is RDF/XML

Long-term issues
* Benchmarking for large number of files
* out-of-box web client acceptance
* fine-grained access control and Shibboleth based AuthN - relevant in DataGRID
* support for sets
* federation model
* collaboration and support
- disseminators for visualizations services; relevant for DataGrid
- Eclipse project to facilitate plugin devel
- Google strategy?
- seminars, tutorials for advanced Fedora users

e-science conferences

This event is an important element of ongoing efforts to achieve the broader goals of The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS - www.itu.int/wsis/ ). In particular, this workshop aims to promote development of institutional policies and guidelines for action in support of the “information commons” for e-science. The work plan comprises four objectives:

• Review opportunities/challenges for realising global collaborative e-science on the emerging "cyber-infrastructure."
• Review government and university mechanisms for managing publicly funded scientific information in the digitally networked research environment; identify problems and develop procedural solutions.
• Identify and analyse institutional, economic, policy, and legal benefits/drawbacks to providing public access to and unrestricted use of publicly funded scientific information.
• Put forward resolutions/recommendations that enable the scientific community to more effectively utilise publicly funded scientific data and information.

Creating the Information Commons for e-Science: Toward Institutional Policies and Guidelines for Action
September 1-2, 2005
Paris, France

CISTI's Director General, Bernard Dumouchel, will be chairing the session Open Archive - INRIA Activity in e-Science

INRIA, the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control, has launched in April 2005 an Open Archive dedicated to its scientific publications. INRIA is committed to the "archive open initiative" since it signed the Berlin declaration on "free access to knowledge in exact sciences, life sciences, human and social sciences", on July 25, 2004.

INRIA is convinced that such an open archive will increase its scientific visibility and impact, keep track of INRIA's scientific output, and be of use to the whole scientific community. INRIA's Open Archive is part of the HAL Open Archive, produced by the CCSD (Center for Direct Scientific Communication) (http://www.ccsd.cnrs.fr/) of CNRS, originally for physicists. INRIA is now collaborating with the CCSD for the future evolution of HAL [Hyper Articles Online]. By signing a framework agreement with CNRS, INRIA will build a pool of its scientific production, based on a self-archiving approach from research scientists.

HAL-INRIA is one of the recent outcomes of the DISC (Direction for Scientific Information and Communication), an INRIA department created in 2001, for defining and implementing INRIA policy regarding the access and dissemination of Scientific Information.

UPDATE 2005-08-22:  There is also an e-science conference in Australia coming up

1st IEEE Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing Dec.  5 – 8, 2005,   Melbourne  ,  Australia
http://www.gridbus.org/escience/

grid computing and SOA

The IT World Canada magazine family has a spotlight on grid computing.
Unfortunately they have an annoying registration scheme to read articles.
Anyway

Cheap servers, bigger bandwidth drive grid by Michael Martin NetworkWorld Canada  (17 Mar 2005)

Another driver for grid is the Web and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). SOA is a collection of services communicating with one another. That communication could involve simply passing data, or it could involve the multiple services coordinating some activity.

SOA is where the true potential of grid computing lies, said Bill St. Arnaud, senior director of advanced networks for CANARIE, Canada’s advanced Internet development organization.

Most existing grid networks are currently internal to organizations, St. Arnaud noted.

“But I think this technology has much greater potential to integrate your business supply chain with your suppliers and your customers,” he said. One challenge companies looking to implement SOA architectures will face is getting carriers to understand the requirements, St. Arnaud warned.

The special feature is supposed to be available at

gridcomputing.itworldcanada.com

That doesn't seem to be working

get gridden - Grid computing and Web Services

Leading the way on the open source front is the Globus Alliance - an organization whose most notable contribution to the cause has been a grid toolkit (GT4) that tightly weaves as many enabling standards as it possibly can -- many of which come from the Web services ecosystem -- into an open-source based solution for building grids. GT4 is to grids what an open source solution like Apache is to Web servers or what GNU Linux is to operating systems (even to the extent that both include implementations of well known standards).

...

On the interoperable standards front, GT4 already has many standards baked into it. As more standards come to bear, particularly in the area of Web services, it's likely they'll be absorbed into the standard grid playbook. As it turns out, Web services and grid computing are virtually synonymous. Both compute paradigms subscribe to the idea that computing tasks can be serviced in utility-like fashion by distributed compute nodes that are discoverable and accessible through standard APIs -- the benefits of which are dynamically scalable and resilient systems that do away with over-provisioning as a method of dealing with peak loads.

from Gridless enterprises should be talking to the EGA

presentations on integrating IT and education

Presentations are available from the second annual Canadian Higher Education and Information Technology Conference (with the rather gangly acronym CANHEIT) in 2004.

CANHEIT 2004 - Reintegrating IT into the Academic Mission

You can get the presentations (PowerPoint or PDF) from the program page.

Of interest:
Towards Intelligent-Infrastructure: Grids and Other Tools for Collaboration (PowerPoint)
Andrew K. Bjerring
President and CEO, CANARIE

presentations from 2004 CANARIE Advanced Networking

Presentations (PowerPoint or PDF) are available from the program page for CANARIE's Advanced Networks Workshop 2004 - Intelligent Infrastructure: Serving Research, Industry and Education.

CANARIE is responsible for CA*Net, the high-speed network that links Canada's universities.

There is a lot of interest in work that combines SOA, Web Services, and Grid Computing.
For example, this presentation

Services in Control: Early Experiences with Service-Oriented Infrastructure and Applications []
Ian Foster
Professor, Argonne National Laboratory & University of Chicago

DELOS - digital library architecture

There is a European project called the DELOS Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries.
It has many sub-components, including Digital Library Architecture, which currently has its cluster home site at www.dbs.ethz.ch/delos/

There is a workshop coming up on Future Digital Library Management Systems (System Architecture & Information Access).  There are two pages with basically the same info, one from the main site and one from the cluster site.  It will be March 29 - April 1, 2005 in Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany.

With respect to system architecture, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Data Management, Grid Middleware (Grid), and Service-oriented Architecture (SoA) are the topics of primary interest.

...

Important Dates
Abstract Submission Deadline: February 4, 2005
Notification of Acceptance: February 21, 2005
Full-Paper Version: March 7, 2005 (to prepare handouts for the  participants)
Workshop: March 29 - April 1st, 2005
Revised Papers: July, 2005 (for the DELOS Post-Proceedings)

via DELOS News feed on Digital Library related RSS news feeds

IBM Emerging Technologies Toolkit

www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/ettk

The ETTK is a software development kit for designing, developing, and executing emerging autonomic and Web service technologies. The ETTK provides an environment in which to run emerging technology examples that showcase recently announced specifications and prototypes from IBM's emerging technology development and research teams. In addition, it provides introductory material to help developers easily get started with development of autonomic technologies, Web services.

The basic software components needed to experiment with and create Web services and autonomic programs are provided with the ETTK. Included is an architectural overview of autonomic technologies, Web services, sample programs, utility services, and some tools that are helpful in developing and deploying autonomic programs and Web services. The toolkit also includes a fully-functioning SOAP and grid infrastructure. ETTK includes a fully-functioning SOAP engine and embedded application server.

The IBM Emerging Technologies Toolkit can be used with Windows® 2000, Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, Redhat Enterprise Linux for Intel 2.1, or UnitedLinux 1.0.

via Web Services Pipeline