1. Education as a Web Service Technology, Experience & Futures
Geoffrey Fox Chief Scientist Anabas Inc.
Professor of Computer Science, Informatics, Physics
and Director PTLIU Laboratory for Community Grids
Indiana University, Bloomington IN
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2. Teaching Jackson State Fall 97 to Fall 2001
JSU
Syracuse
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3. The Virtual University
Motivated either by decreased cost or increased quality of learning environment
Will succeed due to market pressures (it will offer the best product)
Assume that as with text books, only a few pedagogically excellent teachers will produce lectures; only a few charismatic souls deliver them
“Centers of Excellence” (including “One Professor Virtual University”) are natural entities to produce and deliver classes supported by good technology and rich graphics/multi-media (instruction design)
University acts as an integrator putting together a set of classes where it may only teach some 20% but acts as a mentor to all classes its students take
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4. Courses at Jackson State
Taught using Tango/Anabas since fall 97 over Internet twice a week from Syracuse/FSU/Indiana
Course material same style as online material for in-university classes
Curricula, Homework, Grading, Facilities done by “me”
Students get JSU NOT Syracuse/Indiana Credit
Jackson State major MSI (Minority Serving) University with many computer science graduates
Do not compete with base courses but offer addon courses with “leading edge” material (Web Technology, modern scientific computing) which give JSU (under)graduates skills that are important in their career
Fall 99 Semester CPS640 offered to 40 students in 5 distant places and separately 40 at Syracuse
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5. What did this lead to?
Jackson State students got access to curricula that was not otherwise available to them
Developed quite good Information Technology and computational science curricula
Jackson State faculty acted as mentors in course and now teach some of material in their own courses and to other MSI colleges
Make rapidly changing and important curricula available to an MSI network -- could dramatically improve curricula opportunities for MSI students
JSU has institutional commitment to area
Used in High School Java, DoD wide training and Winter 00/01 semester as part of ERDC Graduate Institute
Supports migrant teachers -- I have delivered course spring 00 semester from Syracuse, FSU and ERDC, Vicksburg
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6. Saturday Java Academy
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7. Fall 2001 Technology Desktop A/V Large Room Access Grid
Personal Access Grid + Anabas
Community A/V: The Access Grid
Large Room Access Grid
Desktop A/V
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8. Lessons from Past
“True” Shared Event flexible but too much work for most cases
Shared Display – nearly always works
Shared Export – SVG PDF HTML X3D etc. can be re-used
Integrate synchronous and asynchronous collaboration
Do not build into browser as not a reliable or standard virtual machine
Build around uniform publish-subscribe style XML Event Model supporting archiving, customization, filtering – apply to all collaboration modes
Later we realized need to integrate with Peer to Peer and Web Services (straightforward as XML event model fits these architectures)
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9. SVG Sharing PC to PDA Batik Viewer on PC
PowerPoint can be converted to SVG via Illustrator or Web export
SVG Sharing PC to PDA
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10. Object Web View of the World
“Everything electronic” is a resource
Computers
Programs
Data (from sensors to this presentation to to databases)
People
“Everything electronic” is a distributed object
“All External Interfaces” are defined in XML whether this is a property (data-structure) or a method (service, function, subroutine)
We can assume that a data-structure property has getproperty() and setproperty(value) methods to act as interface
All resources have interfaces
All resources are linked by messages with format and transport protocol to be discussed but as interfaces defined in XML, message structure must be specifiable in XML
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11. The 3 Critical XML Interfaces
Raw Resources
Raw Data
Data (sort of dumb)
Information
User Rendering
(Virtual) XML Data Interface
Processing
Server
Information/Knowledge
(Virtual) XML Information Interface
Render to XML Display Format
(Virtual) XML Rendering Interface
Clients
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12. XML Skin
XML Skin
Message
Or Event
Based
Inter Connection
Resource
Data
base
Soft ware
XML Defined Resources connected by XML defined messages Implementation of resource and connection may or may not be XML
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13. What is a Web Service
A web service is a computer program running on either the local or remote machine with a set of well defined interfaces (ports) specified in WSDL
In principle, computer program can be in any language (Fortran .. Java .. Perl .. Python) and the interfaces can be implemented in any way what so ever
Interfaces can be method calls, Java RMI Messages, CGI Web invocations, totally compiled away (inlining) but
The simplest implementations involve XML messages (SOAP) and programs written in net friendly languages like Java and Python
Web Services separate the meaning of a port (message) interface from its implementation – WSDL Interfaces are virtual XML
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14. Role of Web Services
Define interfaces of web applications so that computer-computer interactions are enabled
Defines virtual XML for all system and application services
WSDL is XML versions of Class and Method definitions
SOAP is XML version of message
UDDI or WSIL catalogs WSDL based services enabling precise linkage of them (
WSFL and WSCL are candidate linkage languages
Security
Catalog
Payment Credit Card
Warehouse
shipping
WSDL interfaces
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15. Raw Resources Clients Raw Data Raw Data Render to XML Display Format
(Virtual) XML Data Interface
Web Service (WS) WS WS WS
etc.
XML WS to WS Interfaces WS
(Virtual) XML Knowledge (User) Interface
Render to XML Display Format
(Virtual) XML Rendering Interface
Clients
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16. Some General Grid or Web Services
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17. Some Science Web Services
These build on general (community) web services
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18. Education as a Web Service
Can link to Science as a Web Service and substitute educational modules
“Learning Object” XML standards already exist from IMS/ADL – need to update architecture
Web Services for virtual university include:
Registration
Performance (grading)
Authoring of Curriculum
Online laboratories for real and virtual instruments
Homework submission
Quizzes of various types (multiple choice, random parameters)
Assessment data access and analysis
Synchronous Delivery of Curricula
Scheduling of courses and mentoring sessions
Asynchronous access, data-mining and knowledge discovery
Learning Plan agents to guide students and teachers
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19. UDDI & Content Management
Consider content to consist of “curricula pages” and meta-data
We have meta-data stored in LDAP, flat files, UDDI, databases (Oracle 9i), XML databases, WebDAV, Web page header tags, JMS topics
Content meta-data and content linked by URI. In general content & meta-data stored separately
Managing meta-data is hardest problem – view as federation of multiple independent heterogeneous databases with separate access and lookup services
Each component is a web service supporting query, access, store etc.
UDDI will be replaced by this more general view
Most of education is meta-data …….
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20. LCMS as a Web Service
For meta-data, just build federated database as a Web Service
Storage, update, lookup of objects
Registration of different control engines
For content, if W3C DOM and Java API as for SVG and “decent” XHTML browsers, then can wrap DOM as a web service for all interface functions
Can of course do this for IE5 but document object model unreliable
Build collaboration systems as sharing Web Service interfaces (not COM or other object API)
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21. Integration of XML/Web Services into an Enterprise I
You are the CIO of a little known state’s (call it Xanadu) education system and been tasked to position it as a 2005 leader in technology enhanced education
Your initial review reveals a multitude of incompatible existing information systems distributed over Xanadu’s 50 campuses
Your cradle to grave community education mandate (which got the Governor elected) implies integration of all aspects of education in your information system
You note that performance issues are much less important in this application than interoperability (it currently takes months to get anything done so what's an extra millisecond or so at a WSDL interface) , so even in current primitive/immature state Web services look attractive
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22. Enterprise Web Services II
We start a requirements analysis and a catalog of existing “raw resources”. This will lead to the clean internal XML(WSDL) interfaces XIF and to the external XML interfaces (XEF) to the raw resources
What is Xanadu Internal Framework (XIF) ?
We find that The Grid Forum community has defined computing interfaces which we will adopt to support infrastructure needed for use of simulations and data repositories in curriculum
We find that Microsoft, the Liberty Alliance and the Grid have Security schemes but are relieved that with a little bit of XSLT (transformations) we can map between them and can define authentication & access control as a Web Service
We join the IMS consortium and adopt their standards for learning meta-data and user related information
We adopt the AICC and ADL SCORM standards for “learning objects” (course pages)
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23. Enterprise Web Services III
We define Xanadu educational agents which use XIF plus RDF/DAML-OIL to be able to capture educational goals
We expect commercial standards compliant solutions will be available for most other needed Educational web services
We find that we must interface with a dreadful collection of external raw resources coming from legacy PeopleSoft SAP Oracle and Microsoft products
As our new model is object (XML) and open standards based we build a separate XII (Xanadu Information Infrastructure) supporting XIF objects
We analyze structure of legacy systems and their relation to XIF and define the external framework XEF which captures much of the raw resources
This XEF Schema is extensible to capture quirks of each legacy system
We build a set of Web services that convert XEF into XIF
We inform vendors that we will only install XIF compliant systems in all future purchases
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24. CollabWS: Collaboration as a Web Service
This includes Audio-Video conferencing, Instant Messengers, shared applications and tools
There are basic standards H323 and SIP
There are peer to peer collaboration approaches like JXTA from Sun
The various commercial products – Anabas …Centra …Webex … Groove Networks effectively defines some shared application interfaces
CollabWS defines a superset of collaboration properties and subservices in XML/WSDL
Then you provide several bindings of collabws.wsdl to new transports and old ones (binary H323)
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25. H323 SIP JXTA
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26. SIP H323 JXTA
SIP
H323
JXTA
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27. A Typical SIP Message
REGISTER sip:registrar.biloxi.com Via: SIP/2.0/UDP :5060 To: Bob From: Bob Call-ID: CSeq: 1826 REGISTER Contact: Expires: 7200 Contact-Length: 0
Initially build a wrapper that accepts such messages and converts to …..
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28. Collaboration as a Web service - now
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29. SIP as XML
<sipasxml> <register> sip:registrar.biloxi.com</register> <via> SIP/2.0/UDP :5060</via> <to> Bob </to> <from tag="456248" > Bob </from> <call-id> </call-id> <cseq> 1826 REGISTER </cseq> <contact> </contact> <expires> 7200 </expires> <contact-length> 0 </contact-length> </sipasxml>
So this is either an internal format to which we map SIP messages or it is an external format used for Collaboration Web Service
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30. Future Collaboration Web Service
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31. Messaging/Events as a Web Service
We can implement messaging subsystem (between WSDL resources) with either direct messages or by a queued system where you publish messages to queues and subscribe as receiver to particular queues
There are many different publish/subscribe models
JMS is a cluster of central servers
JXTA is a very dynamic Peer to Peer model where pipes are queues and topics (metadata) are service advertisements
One could have different ports in Messaging/Event Web Service corresponding to the different JMS or JXTA fault tolerance/reliability semantics
Could use JMS as long distance “carrier” between JXTA peers
JXTA provides higher performance than JMS for nearby recipients
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32. Destination Source Matching
Event Web Service
Web Service 1
(Virtual) Queue
Web Service 2
Destination Source Matching
Filter
Routing
workflow
WSDL Ports
Filter is mapping to PDA or slow communication channel (universal access) – see our PDA adaptor
Workflow natural as all messages “intercepted” by Event Web Service
Routing illustrated by JXTA
Destination-Source matching illustrated by JMS
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33. Broker Network
Software multicast
P2P: Brokers are clients
Resource
Data
base
Broker
Broker
Broker
Broker
Broker
Brokers created dynamically when needed for a new cluster of resources
Broker
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34. Narada JXTA/JMS Integration
Is a network of event brokers which can reliably deliver XML specified events
Using openJMS selection module, becomes a distributed or conventional Java Message Service
Linking special JXTA proxies, it can link JXTA communities
Think of JXTA JMS and “native” Narada as different bindings (ports) in an event/messaging web service
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35. Peer to Peer Grid Peer to Peer Grid Community Grid JXTA Database JMS
Event Broker
JMS
JXTA
Peer to Peer Grid
Community Grid
Peer to Peer Grid
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36. PDA Collaboration Adaptor
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37. MyProfessor on the PDA
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38. Component –based Portal
Web Services provide a component model for the middleware (see large “common component architecture” effort in Dept. of Energy)
Should match each WSDL component with a corresponding user interface component
Thus one “must use” a component model for the portal with again an XML specification (portalML) of portal component
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