1. Exploring ‘Workspaces’ Tom Visser, SARA compute and networking services, Amsterdam Garching Workshop 21 st September 2010

2. Background Overview of cases Technical possibilities Opportunities and risks Expected results Proposed approach

3. The CLARIN-NL connection Seeking to create an infrastructure for language resources Providing access to tools and technologies CLARIN-NL and BiG Grid are exploring possibilities The WHOLE pipeline –Creating –Curation –Collecting –DO SCIENCE –Depositing

4. Already SARA has developed a client implementation of a Persistent Identifier Service (HANDLE) and has become an EPIC consortium member Instance of service currently hosted at SARA BiG Grid / SURFNET pilot with Short lived credential service Activities with Computational Linguistics (e.g. Named Entity Recognition) & forthcoming Computational Humanities institute (KNAW) Series of workshop to find a common ground between BiG Grid and the CLARIN infrastructure

8. Questions of today When is a user workspace service? Why do we need user workspaces? What are their characteristics in a distributed environment? How do we support processing chains in distributed environments driven by community environments Are there generic frameworks for the execution of distributed processing chains and deployment of web-services

9. Core problems Where to store How to store How to access How to foster collaboration amongst people How to support: Data discovery, exploration and exploitation How to realize such a service What SLA / service description / responsibilities

10. What it should be A temporary storage place (days, weeks, years) –Global home / global scratch –A ‘logical mount point’ Accessible by web services Meaningfully accessible by a human Autonomy to communities –Instantiate –Content –Control Identifiable Store digital objects and metadata Journaling (register interactions)

11. Create Read Write Update Grant access to (Authorization) List contents Search contents –Adopting & offering known best practices and services in the ecosystem …

12. Considered technical possibilities iRODS Cloud platform (SNIA/CDMI) HADOOP implementation AMAZON S3 / OpenCloud / Azure /

13. Risks and opportunities Creating something that is only generic - specific Looking uphill, but what will you know when you’ve climbed the hill Knowledge of the community Epistemological problems Bootstrapping Trust Proces focus: we are starting a small scale pilot within 1 month, short iterations, keeping everyone involved.

14. Approach: BiG Grid and Dutch partners Many interesting addressable cases –Keyword extraction from dutch audio and film institute –MPI video repository annotations –City of Den Haag government proceedings: minutes and video alignment (feature extraction) –OCR & Machine learning on dutch handwritings Expected results –Common understanding of a workspace service –Bootstrap implementation vertically crossing all layers

15. When is a user workspace service? –When it is used and has become an indispensible tool Why do we need user workspaces? –To be able to flexibly work with data –Initiate collaborations –Have a trustable storage resource availble What are their characteristics in a distributed environment? –Clear core functionality, many service providers, integration with identity providers How do we support processing chains in distributed environments driven by community environments –By having open, known, and easily accessible services Are there generic frameworks for the execution of distributed processing chains and deployment of web- services –Yes!

16. THANK YOU