Open Grid Forum 20 Report (ID - 111)
Ian Kelley
School of Computer Science,
Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK
Email: I.R.Kelley@cs.cardiff.ac.uk
30th May 2007
This GridNet2 report gives an overview of my activities at OGF20 in Manchester, which
took place May 7 - 11, 2007. I participated in the following sessions:
• Sharing Workflows — Although the general session focused on the need for sharing
workflows for scientific applications, there was work presented here for an OMII-UK
portals project I am involved in (Workflows Hosted in Portals - WHIP). This project
is seeking to build standardized portal mechanisms for accessing shared artifacts, or
digital objects, for example workflow descriptions. OGF could prove a very good forum to get more involvement in this project from other communities, especially other
OMII-UK institutions, and make the work more standardized and useful for external projects. An overview of the WHIP project was presented by Andrew Harrison
(Cardiff University), and discussions followed offline with other OMII-UK groups to
synchronize efforts on some projects and make the different software interoperable.
Other presentations that are interesting from the portals perspective were:
– “myExperiment - social software for workflow sharing” - David De Roure, University of Southampton and OMII-UK
– “Shibboleth Protection and Management of Workflows” - Richard Sinnott, National e-Science Centre, University of Glasgow
• OGSA Workflow — I attended this session to see the current status of OGSA workflow
and potentially how it would relate to WHIP and other portal issues. The session was
interesting, but rather unrelated to many of the portal issues (as one might expect).
• Service Oriented Knowledge Utilities (SOKU) Session — This session was interesting
to see some of the new technologies that are being adopted and brought forth in the
Web 2.0 community. It was useful to attend to see the possible future directions that
portal development can take such as AJAX.
• Additional Sessions — I also attended several additional sessions, such as “eArts
and Humanities”, “Grid: a means to what end?”, “Scaling Up to the Enterprise
Level”, “Collaborative Grids,” as well as a various keynotes. These sessions were
interesting to show the future directions the Grid is moving in, especially from the
view of corporations that are deploying Grids, and what tools and technologies they
are using in this facility.
In addition, following a brief meeting with Rob Allan at OGF20 in which we discussed
our related portal projects, I have contacted him, Michael Russell (GridSphere), and Marlon
Pierce (OGCE) regarding the status of the GCE-RG at OGF. Marlon, Michael and I had
a discussion about the credential issues related to OGCE and GridPortlets, came up with
some initial ideas, and agreed that the Web 2.0 sessions at OGF21 would provide a good
opportunity for people to meet, share ideas, and find collaborations.