WIS V-GISC – Simdat WMO REGIONAL SEMINAR OUAGADOUGOU BURKINA FASO February 2007 Jacques Roumilhac

WIS  Will of WMO to renew the Information System  FWIS: Future WMO Information System  Now we speak about the WIS (the ‘F’ disappears)  Based on Core Metadata on XML Format to define all the data  GTS renewal included in the philosophy  Nodes: GISC, DCPC and NC  GISC: Global Information System Centre  VGISC: Virtual Global Information System Centre (MetOffice, Météo France, DWD, Eumetsat, ECMWF)

WIS Functional Requirements  Support variety of data types (Common to all WMO Programmes)  Support Archive and Real-time datasets  Provide a Catalogue of all the meteorological data for exchange to support WMO programmes  Support ad-hoc requests for data and products: Pull model  Support routine dissemination of all observed data and products both real-time and non real-time : Push model  Support network security  Support of different users profile and data policies  Use different types of communication links (GTS, satellite, dedicated links)

 European Project on Grid Technology  Decided in 2004 to do a demonstrator V-GISC on Simdat backbone  SIMDAT focuses on 4 application areas: –product design in automotive and aerospace, –process design in pharmacology –service provision in meteorology Phase 1 : Connectivity Phase 2 : Interoperability Phase 3 : Knowledge. Deployment of Infrastructure with particular attention to data transport and management. Distributed Data access. Virtual Data Repository. Introduction of Grid technologies research. Introduction of VO. Integration of analysis services, workflows, discovery and data mining SIMDAT

Meteorology Application : Project Aims  Service oriented framework targeting meteorology, hydrology, climate and environment and offering transparent access to distributed resources –Discovery service, cataloguing service, subscription service, …  Some key elements of the project are: –A single view of meteorological information which is distributed amongst the meteorological partners –Improve visibility and access to meteorological data through a comprehensive discovery service –Offer a variety of reliable services for collection and sharing of data and for routine dissemination (future) –Provide a global access control policy managed by the partners and integrated into their existing security infrastructure (future)

Architecture  3 main components to build the virtual database: Data Repository, Catalogue Node and Portal –Installed on each partner site and interconnected through a dedicated secure connection channel  Data Repository –Interface to the partners databases –Offers metadata information to describe, search, locate data –Offers interface to retrieve data from the associated local databases  Catalogue Node –Maintains the registry and ensures synchronisation –Harvests metadata and requests data from the data Repository –Ingests data and maintains the cache of the real-time data –Serves clients: Portal or other Nodes –Monitors the execution of the requests  Distributed Portal –Offers interface to search/browse the catalogue

Architecture (cont.)

Support variety of data types  Interface to the existing Meteorological Databases –It provides access to any kind of databases (rdbms, bespoke, flat files)  Metadata provider –Provide Metadata information to discover, locate and describe data, in respect with a defined XML metadata format –Answer Catalogue Node metadata harvesting messages  Data provider –Provide an interface to asynchronously request data from the associated existing database –Transform the XML data request to the real database request –Offer a data channel (HTTP, FTP, …) to send the retrieved data to the Catalogue Node

Support variety of data types Satellite data ERA40 data TIGGE data Climate Time Series Aviation data (TAF, METAR) Lightning data Model output Real-time GTS data Model output Climate Time Series Model output Observation Model output Satellite data Model output Wave Observation Community Portal Catalogue Oceanographic data (BATHY, SHIP) More than 27,000 datasets discoverable

Catalogue of all available products  The Catalogue is built using the metadata harvested from the Data Repositories  The Catalogue is synchronized and replicated on each Catalogue Node  The Catalogue Node offers discovery services accessible to the user through the distributed portal  The Catalogue contains the necessary information to retrieve and sub select the data

WMO Core metadata standard - Challenges  WMO Core Profile, profile of ISO19115 on geo-referenced data  Scalability –Records are large and contain redundant information, slowing down the database hosting the catalogue –Same information repeated in all metadata records  Unnecessary information is circulating over the network –Some documents are orders of magnitude larger than data itself –Cannot represent very large archives with small granularity  Cannot fulfil all requirements to build the V-GISC –Information on how to retrieve data from local databases –Information to create a directory (Taxonomy of documents) –Information to sub-select data from a dataset

WMO Core metadata standard - Solutions  Add specific extension to define all relevant information needed to implement the system and not defined by the WMO core –Internal unique ID –Hierarchy relationship –Physical location (which node holds the data) –Information used to generate a valid request to retrieve data from the end system –Information used to create web interface for the end user  Work with WMO ET to integrate extensions in future releases of standards WMO UKMO Synop Heathrow Core Owner Data type Location Date  Split XML documents into fragments to solve the scalability issue –WMO core metadata is structured –Some parts are shared amongst many documents

Metadata Synchronization  New observation has been received by one site

Metadata Synchronization (cont.)  The associated metadata are generated and published in the Data Repository

Metadata Synchronization (cont.)  Catalogue Node harvests the new metadata and stores it in its Catalogue

Metadata Synchronization (cont.)  The Catalogue of the other Nodes is synchronized and the dataset is searchable from any sites

Support Archive and Real-time Data  A GTS Data Repository has been developed –Interfaced with the GTS (through a MSS) –It publishes GTS collections in the Cache –Currently,no data replication over the SIMDAT infrastructure  For phase III several sources plugged onto SIMDAT –Strategy to uniquely identify the datasets (using MD5 hash codes) –Real-time data replication using the metadata synchronization mechanism –Generic Solution that can be used by all the partners

Support Pull model  A Portal is deployed on each site and offers a unique view of all the datasets available  Portal offers discovery mechanisms to the users –Full text, temporal and geographical search (google- like) –Directory browsing (yahoo-like browsing)  Portal provides request handling mechanisms to the users –Submitted requests can be asynchronous to manage long-lived requests – Users can manage requests (check status, delete them …) – Users retrieve the associated data when the request is complete

Support of different profile and data policies  VO Domain –Group of organisations that share a common data access policy (e.g. the RA-VI V-GISC) –Access to protected resources occurs on a domain basis  Authentication (AuthN) –Users register with a node –Users are known to all the nodes in the same domain –Any node within the domain should be able to authenticate a user of the domain  Authorisation (AuthZ) –AuthZ is performed at the node level to allow/deny access to the data –Data Access policy is expressed within the metadata  Implementation : first release March 2007 A B C F E VO Domain D1D1 D2D2