OGSA-DAI
Applications
OGSA-DAI has contributed to projects and organisations around the world, in sectors including medical research, geographical information systems, meteorology, transport, computer-aided design, engineering and astronomy.
These are some of the many projects to whose success OGSA-DAI is contributing or has contributed in the past.
Pioneering data mining
ADMIRE - Advanced Data Mining and Integration Research in Europe
2008 to 2011
The ADMIRE Project is a collaboration between six European academic and commercial partners with strong interests in making sense of today's torrents of research and business data.
ADMIRE is pioneering architectures and models that will deliver a coherent, extensible and flexible framework to make the best use of a wide range of distributed data resources. The new architecture will improve the accessibility and exploitation of data for domain experts and provide a workbench for data mining and integration experts which will, in turn, improve their productivity and the rate of deployment of new methods and applications.
ADMIRE is developing a software platform to test important architectural ideas. OGSA-DAI forms a key component of this platform, providing the enactment engine for data mining workflows consumed by the ADMIRE Gateway services. ADMIRE works closely with OGSA-DAI developers on distributed query processing and data stream performance engineering.
ADMIRE's research is being applied to the areas of flood modelling and customer relationship management.
Advancing biomedical research through data sharing
BIRN - Biomedical Informatics Research Network
2001 to Present
BIRN is a major US initiative funded by the National Institute for Health, providing tools, services and infrastructure for data sharing across a wide range of biomedical research sites. BIRN's current users range from small research groups to large US organisations including the Cardiovascular Research Grid and Nonhuman Primate Research Consortium.
The Information Integration Working Group within BIRN is tasked with the research and development of technologies to integrate data from disparate sources. To this end they leverage the capabilities of OGSA-DAI's Distributed Query Processor engine to help provide the necessary consistent, unified view of vital biomedical research data.
Sharing satellite, geological and ground-sensed data
GEO Grid
2005 to Present
Japan-based GEO Grid has developed an e-science infrastructure for the earch sciences community to access a wide variety of data including satellite imagery, geological data and ground sensed data. Access to data is via services which enforce access control policies consistent with the licensing policies of the data owners.
The GEO Grid infrastructure needs to support various Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards, but should also be based on a distributed, scalable, and secure framework. For these reasons GEO Grid makes use of OGSA-DAI to achieve database federation that can integrate various kinds of distributed data.
Monitoring traffic pollution
MESSAGE - Mobile Environmental Sensing System Across Grid Environments
2006 to 2009
MESSAGE was a three-year research project which was funded jointly by the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the Department for Transport.
The project, led by Imperial College London, included researchers at Universities of Cambridge, Leeds, Newcastle and Southampton. The project also had the support of nineteen non-academic organisations from public sector transport operations, commercial equipment providers, systems integrators and technology suppliers.
MESSAGE developed a distributed infrastructure for the capture, processing and analysis of pollution data from heterogeneous mobile and static pollution sensors. OGSA-DAI was used to provide a common interface to a set of different databases across multiple sites. OGSA-DAI's distributed query processing enabled the querying of data from multiple databases in order to generate new, application-specific data marts and supported user queries for mining of raw historic pollution data.
Applying grid and cloud technology to business
BEinGRID - Business Experiments in Grid
2006 to 2009
BEinGRID was an ambitious EC-funded, 95-partner project to establish effective routes for the adoption of grid and cloud technologies across the EU and to stimulate research into innovative business models using these technologies.
BEinGRID applied OGSA-DAI to the area of data synchronization for SMEs,
looking at joining existing business-to-business platforms without
changes to legacy information systems. An OGSA-DAI component called the
OGSA-DAI
trigger was developed by BEinGRID to enable automated, selective
data replication across databases. The solution was piloted by Ducati
Motor.
Read more
about BEinGRID's data synchronization using OGSA-DAI
BEinGRID also investigated the use of OGSA-DAI to provide a uniform
data access service for companies in the food services and tourism
sectors.
Read more
about BEinGRID's sales management work using OGSA-DAI.
BEinGRID also developed, or contributed to the development of, other
OGSA-DAI components including a
data source publisher for the easy deployment of OGSA-DAI,
query
translator which allows database schemas to be transformed (which
is now part of the OGSA-DAI product) and a
JDBC driver
that allows OGSA-DAI to inter-operate with JDBC-compliant data analysis
tools.
One of the major outcomes of BEInGRID was IT-Tude - a repository of information and tools relating to the use of grid and cloud by business.
Researching the ancient world
LaQuAT - Linking and Querying Ancient Texts
2008 to 2009
LaQuAT was a collaboration between the Centre for e-Research Kings College, London and EPCC, The University of Edinburgh.
LaQuAT applied OGSA-DAI to the domain of epigraphy. Epigraphy is concerned with the study of ancient texts e.g. books, papryi, inscriptions on stone tablets or parchments.
Information about these texts are gathered and stored in databases. This information includes what the artifact is, where it was found, where it originates from, when it is thought to date from, what the incription says, and myriad other information. The data may be in relational, XML, plain-text or other non-standard formats, and different researchers may use their own formats. As there are numerous researchers in the field, the data is distributed globally. OGSA-DAI was used to provide a uniform interface to relational and XML data and to support queries over these.
Researching innovative data technologies
Database Grid
2005 to Present
Database Grid is a Japanese project researching innovative ways in which to provide uniform views over heterogeneous data. It is looking at spectrum, geographic, and biological databases. One aspect of its research is using OGSA-DAI's distributed query processing functionality with RDF.
Other applications...
Information about the many other projects that have used OGSA-DAI is available here...