1. Brokering as a Core Element of EarthCube’s Cyberinfrastructure
NSF EarthCube Concept Award
S.J.S. Khalsa, M. Parsons, R. Duerr, J. Pearlman, F. Pearlman, S. Browdy, S. Nativi
Overview
We are studying a candidate technology for the EarthCube Cyberinfrastruture called brokering. In a generic sense a broker is an intermediary sitting between a client application and one or more resources. A broker can also interact with multiple clients on behalf of a single resource. What this Concept Award is exploring is a Brokering Framework that serves as an integrating element for many resources, enabling the utilization of these resources by different communities using the protocols, metadata standards, semantics and data formatting that are familiar to that community.
Options for Providing Integrated Access to Community Resources
Access Broker
Semantic Broker
Discovery Broker
Web 2.0 Broker
Publish
Broker
Brokering Framework (tier)
Web 2.0 Resources
EarthCube
Geoscience Resources
Semantic engines
Thesauri/ Gazetteers
Data Provider Resources (tier)
User Applications/ portals (tier)
Disciplines, consortia, project teams (Communities of Practice or CoP) establish a “service bus” consisting of community catalogs, data models, semantics, etc. that connects users with providers of services (data, processing, visualization, etc.) within the context of that community. Users in other communities must use the mechanisms of each separate community to find and access the data of those communities.
Definition of Brokering
Brokers are middleware interconnecting client and server components in the EarthCube cyber-infrastructure.
Brokers are services facilitating the run-time interconnection (sharing of resources) among users and providers in a way that requires little effort on the part of either.
A Brokering Framework is an infrastructure service maintained by a third party for the benefit of diverse community of stakeholders.
A Brokering Framework may include discovery, semantic enhancement and natural language, data access, processing and publishing services.
A provider wishing to make their data available to different communities must configure their server to “speak the language” of the clients in all those communities. Likewise, a CoP Service Bus would have to be so configured for each community. Furthermore, each provider, or CoP, would have to go through the same effort.
Project Status
Vetted brokering definition with community
Performing broker evaluations (hack-a-thons)
Collaborating with other EarthCube Teams on applications of brokering in their environments
Working with international science partners on brokering use cases
Drafted Brokering Roadmap for discussion at the EarthCube Charrette
Contributing to dialog on infrastructure development options and related schedules
The Brokering approach
Advantages of Brokering
Lowers barriers to participation in distributed systems for both users and resource providers (minimal burden or cost impact on existing systems)
Accelerates interconnection of disparate systems
Facilitates sustainability, reusability, extensibility, and flexibility of the infrastructure
Enhances multi-disciplinary interoperability via introduction of new capabilities across multiple domains
Removes need to impose common (e.g. federal, “top-down”) specifications and software components enabling a more adaptive “bottom-up” evolution of the infrastructure.
We believe the EarthCube cyberinfrastructure should include a brokering component that removes the burdens of enabling interoperability from providers and users.
J&F E
ESIP Summer Meeting 2012, Madison, WI