Speaker
Describe the added value of the Grid for the scientific/technical activity you (plan to) do on the Grid. This should include the scale of the activity and of the potential user community and the relevance for other scientific or business applications
The biomedical community intends to deploy a distributed metadata system for medical images consisting of various sites, which range from hospitals to computing centres. Only safe sharing of the highly sensitive metadata as provided in AMGA makes such a scenario possible. We will give an update on the latest additions to the replication features of AMGA and also report on how AMGA's capabilities have been validated and used by the Health-e-Child project.
Another ongoing development in AMGA is the addition of a WS-DAIR standard compliant web-service interface, which should allow improved interoperability with other WS-DAI grid services, in particular in the field of earth observation with its heterogeneous data sources. Here, also the addition of an importation feature should be of great significance as it allows to directly access pre-existing databases without copying data.
Finally we will give an overview of the ongoing integration of AMGA into the gLite 3.1, which will further eas
Describe the scientific/technical community and the scientific/technical activity using (planning to use) the EGEE infrastructure. A high-level description is needed (neither a detailed specialist report nor a list of references).
The gLite-AMGA metadata catalogue is developed by NA4 to provide simple relational metadata access for the EGEE community. AMGA is extensively used by the biomedical community to store medical images metadata, digital libraries, in HEP for logging and bookkeeping data and the climate community. This presentation focuses on presenting new developments in the catalogue, like metadata replication, a new WS-DAIR compatible interface, making existing databases accessible and the gLite 3.1 integration
Report on the experience (or the proposed activity). It would be very important to mention key services which are essential for the success of your activity on the EGEE infrastructure.
We expect that the new developments in AMGA will allow the biomedical community to evolve their current much centralized setup to a truly distributed environment, without making compromises on the security. In a replicate environment security is a very complex problem, because it requires the nodes to establish some sort of trusted relationship. We will show how these problems have been tackled, which may be of interest also for other services in a Grid environment. In particular the experiences gained by the Health-e-Child project should be very valuable.
The WS-DAIR compatible interface to AMGA, together with the new import feature, will make access to large existing databases and integration with other data sources much simpler and should make it much simpler to port existing applications to the Grid, when they need relational data access.
