Brian Matthews, euroCRIS, 18/09/03 CRIS architecture to support an ERA Brian Matthews

Brian Matthews, euroCRIS, 18/09/03 Objective To support an Integrated European RTD Information System. Needs to support: –Researchers, –exploiters and –decision makers And needs to be: –Robust –Easy to use –Extensible –“future proof”

Brian Matthews, euroCRIS, 18/09/03 Key Principles Certain general principles should underpin this. –Institutional Independence –Common exchange formats –Distributed control –Multilinguality –Easy to use tools Can provide access as a Service

Brian Matthews, euroCRIS, 18/09/03 Institution Independence Institutions should be able to maintain their own research information Institutions keep ownership and can use the information for their own needs. Institutions should be able to use their own internal formats and internal information systems (DB and OS independence). Without these, institutional buy-in will be hard.

Brian Matthews, euroCRIS, 18/09/03 Common Exchange Formats A common exchange format (ontology) for expressing data (CERIF) Common APIs onto the local CRIS’s for query and return of information. Local formats related to the common format by well-defined mappings.

Brian Matthews, euroCRIS, 18/09/03 Distributed Control Loose coupling between institutions No overall administration Collection of information at node points for efficiency Periodic update and mirroring Single point of authentication

Brian Matthews, euroCRIS, 18/09/03 Multilinguality Vital in a European (and wider) context. Multilingual thesauri Multilingual interfaces Multilingual querying and response.

Brian Matthews, euroCRIS, 18/09/03 Easy to use tools Don’t demand unfamiliar tools and interfaces upon users Based around a standard web architecture Use Browsers as the Front-end.

Brian Matthews, euroCRIS, 18/09/03 Integration with other repositories As a service component it should allow access to other repositories –Library and publication archives –Data archives –“Grid Portals” Mediate and control combination of services An active component in the GRID. Need to coordinate with other communities –Common metadata –Common Interfaces –Common digital curation problems.

Brian Matthews, euroCRIS, 18/09/03 Key Technologies Preference for Web technologies –“open” development –Widely available and supported –Open source implementations Should also prepare for integration into the GRID

Brian Matthews, euroCRIS, 18/09/03 Key Technologies Basic Web technologies: –http, HTML, CSS Fundamental exchange mechanism: –XML, XSLT, XML Schema Component interfaces: –Web Services (SOAP, WDSL, UDDI?, XACML?, SAML?) User Preferences –P3P, CC/PP Knowledge representation and modelling: –RDF, RDF Schema, DAML+OIL (WebOnt) Generic Querying system: –XML Query? (XSQL?, RQL?) Programming layer: –Java and Java Servlets

Brian Matthews, euroCRIS, 18/09/03 Strawman Architecture Common metadata Specific metadata Raw data Specific metadata Raw data Specific metadata Raw data Users Web Service wrapperWS wrapper XML Query over http ERIS broker CRIS Service WS wrapper Directory service Specific metadata Access control service User service ERIS portal Local data cache

Brian Matthews, euroCRIS, 18/09/03 Components Broker –Directory Service –Metadata Service –Query Service –Results Service –User Service –Access control service Distributed query across HTTP Web Service front-end to local CRIS –Xml wrapper to produce the right data.

Brian Matthews, euroCRIS, 18/09/03 From here? Service architecture proposed Amalgamate results from different CRIS systems Common exchange format – and Ontologies Common Thesaurus? Local Caching of results? A P2P hierarchy?

Brian Matthews, euroCRIS, 18/09/03 ERCIM 15 research institutes in mathematics, comp sci and IT Wide spread across Europe Well connected to science and tech, academia, govnt, industry A pool of expertise