Speaker
Dr
Tony Calanducci
(INFN Catania)
Description
Nowadays huge amounts of information are searched and used by people from all over
the world, but it is not always easy to find out what one is looking for. Search
engines helps a lot, but they do not provide a standard and uniform way to make
queries.
The challenge of gLibrary is to design and develop a robust system to handle
Multimedia Contents in a easy, fast and secure way exploiting the Grid.
Examples of Multimedia Contents are images, videos, music, all kind of electronic
documents (PDF, Excel, PowerPoint, Word, HTML), E-Mails and so on. New types of
content can be added easily into the system.
Thanks to the fixed structure of the attributes per each content type, queries are
easier to perform allowing the users to choose their search criteria among a
predefined set of attributes.
The following are possible use examples:
- A user wants to look for all the comedies in which Jennifer Aniston performed
together with Ben Stiller, produced in 2004 ; or find all the songs of Led Zeppelin
that last for more than 6 minutes;
- An user needs to find all the PowerPoint Presentation about Data Management
System in 2005 run by Uncle Sam (fantasy name);
- A doctor wants to retrieve all the articles and presentations about lung cancer
and download some lung X-ray images to be printed in his article for a scientific
magazine;
- (Google for storage) a job behaves as a “storage crawler”: it scans all the files
stored in Storage Elements and publishes their related specific information into
gLibrary for later searches through their attributes.
Not all the users of the system have the same authority into the system. Three kind
of users are enabled: gLibrary Generic Users, members of a Virtual Organization
recognized by the system, can browse the library and make queries. They can also
retrieve the wanted files if the submitter user authorized them; gLibrary Submitter
Users can upload new entries attaching them the proper values for the defined
attributes; finally gLibrary Administrator are allowed to define new content type
and elect Generic User granting them submission rights.
A first level of security on single file is implemented: files uploaded to Storage
Elements can be encrypted using a symmetric key. This will be placed in a special
directory into the system and the submitter will define which users are the rights
to read it.
All the application is built on top of the grid services offered by the EGEE
middleware: actual data is stored in Storage Elements spread around the world,
while the File Catalog keeps track of where they are located. A Metadata Catalog
service is intensively used to contains the values of attributes and satisfy user’s
queries. Finally, A Virtual Organization Membership Service comes in help to deal
with authorization.
Authors
Dr
Tony Calanducci
(INFN Catania)
Dr
Valeria Ardizzone
(INFN Catania)
Co-authors
Dr
Emidio Giorgio
(INFN Catania)
Mr
Gianluca Passaro
(INFN Catania)
Dr
Giuseppe Andronico
(INFN Catania)
Dr
Giuseppe La Rocca
(INFN Catania)
Mr
Giuseppe Platania
(INFN Catania)
Dr
Marco Pappalardo
(INFN Catania)
Prof.
Roberto Barbera
(INFN Catania)
Mrs
Rosanna Catania
(INFN Catania)
Dr
Salvatore Monforte
(INFN Catania)
