19th APAN Meetings in Bangkok

1. 19th APAN Meetings in Bangkok Innovative Uses of Pervasive Broadband Network Is adoption of technology running ahead of policy and practice? Dr Malcolm Read JISC Executive Secretary

2. What is the JISC The JANET Network Middleware Application e-Research e-Learning CONTENT

3. JISC’S MISSION To provide world-class leadership in the innovative use of ICT to support education and research

4. JISC BUDGET

5. Committees & Consultation e-Learning e-Research e-Administration e-Resources Services Development Programmes Information Environment Middleware Network Outreach & Embedding

6. Summer break SJ4 JANET Usage TBytes Month

7. International Usage TBytes

8. MIDDLEWARE • JISC Core Middleware requirements can be summarised as follows: • An access management solution that will solve access to internal resources (e.g. computer facilities, exam papers) as well as external resources. • Need for support for long-term stable collaborations between institutions, particularly collaborative e-learning scenarios.    • Need for support for ‘ad-hoc’ collaborations between groups of researchers (‘virtual organisations’). • Continued need for support for access to external resources, preferably via a ‘single sign-on’.

9. INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT • A number of countries have launched national programmes to roll out middleware within research and higher education • Already some major schemes which target the whole population within these communities, for example, authentication and authorisation schemes for access to digital context • Now facing imminent issues in extending these schemes: • inter-working between schemes, to move from national to international coverage • expanding federations of trust • not principally technical issues • Malcolm Read and Ken Klingenstein proposed an international meeting to try to define a way ahead

10. INTERNATIONAL MIDDLEWARE EVENT • Hosted by JISC • Representatives invited from countries which have committed funding to a comprehensive national programme • Attended by representatives from Australia, Finland, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, UK, US and CERN • Aims: • to establish framework for further international collaboration of authentication and authorisation systems, leading • to interoperable user mechanisms, and • to help other countries develop similar large-scale systems

11. GLOBAL INTER-WORKING OF NATIONAL SCHEMES • Most schemes (‘federations of trust’) are limited to one country • The network peering model is relevant to extending coverage • Set of criteria needed to judge whether to accept a ‘candidate’ federation • Key Action: production of a ‘cookbook’ to describe the criteria and the selection process

12. THE COOKBOOK • The cookbook should contain • guidance on practical issues of setting up a scheme • criteria for judging the quality of a scheme • design of structures to underpin governance and management • examples of successful implementations • The cookbook should also help those countries planning to set up a scheme for the first time • It was agreed that the first version of the cookbook should be produced on a short time-scale

13. OUTPUTS • On behalf of the organisations attending, it was agreed to fund: • the authoring of the cookbook • a full-time facilitator for one year initially • Both of these will be actioned immediately: the timescale for the production of the cookbook will be short. • These initial actions may be extended in conjunction with other interested parties. • The estimate costs of the initial actions is about €150K.

14. THE UK E-SCIENCE PROGRAMME • In November 2000 funding for UK e-Science programme was announced, with allocations to programmes within each of the Research Councils • Core e-Science Programme develops and brokers generic technology solutions and generic middleware to enable e-Science. • The Core e-Science Programme is managed by EPSRC on behalf of all the Research Councils. • Example project – DAME http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/dame/

15. DAME (Distributed Aircraft Maintenance Environment) • EPSRC Funded, £3.2 Million, 3 years, commenced Jan 2002. • UK pilot project for e-Science • Aims to show the utility of Grid computing for data and compute intensive engineering problems • A generic system applicable in many domains

16. DAME PARTNERS • 4 Universities: • Universities of York, Sheffield, Oxford, Leeds • 3 Industrial Partners: • Rolls-Royce • Data Systems and Solutions • Cybula Ltd

17. DEMONSTRATOR OBJECTIVES The DAME demonstration system provides a diagnosis workbench (portal) which brings together a suite of analysis services via Grid technology: • Provides access to a range of analysis tools for the engine diagnosis process • Will act as central control point for automated workflows • Manages issues of distributed diagnosis team and virtual organisations • Manages issues of security and user roles.

18. OPERATIONAL SCENARIO Engine flight data London Airport Airline office New York Airport Grid Diagnostics Centre Maintenance Centre American data center European data center

19. DAME GRID CHALLENGES • Building ‘proof of concept’ for Grid technology in the aerospace diagnostic domain. • Two primary Grid challenges: • Management of large, distributed and heterogeneous data repositories; • Rapid data mining and analysis of fault data; • Other key (commercial) issues: • Remote, secure access to flight data and other operational data and resources; • Management of distributed users and resources; • Quality of Service issues (and Service Level Agreements)

20. e-RESEARCH AGENDA • Significant infrastructure challenges: • creation of a ‘multidisciplinary research environment’ for research-intensive universities (see VRE slides) • mechanisms to systematically collect, preserve and make available digital information

21. e-RESEARCH AGENDA (continued) • need for a ‘national e-infrastructure’ to support the research community: SJ5 will provide a network infrastructure to support researchers’ sustained, high capacity data transfers, and also facilitate collaboration across education and research • need to encourage young people to study science subjects: JISC funded three pilot projects to provide school students access to some of the most advanced scientific applications currently available

22. VIRTUAL RESEARCH ENVIRONMENT (VRE) • VRE aims to help researchers in all disciplines manage the complex range of tasks involved in research • Standards-based, service-oriented architecture • Integrated functionality • Managed / secure / sustainable • Usable and accessible • Personalised • ‘Agent-assisted’ / ’Intelligent’ • Extensible • Collaborative • Portable / ubiquitous access

23. Presentation services: subject, media-specific, data, commercial portals Searching , harvesting, embedding Resource discovery, linking, embedding Resource discovery, linking, embedding Data creation / capture / gathering: laboratory experiments, Grids, fieldwork, surveys, media Data analysis, transformation, mining, modelling Aggregator services: national, commercial Learning object creation, re-use Harvestingmetadata Learning & Teaching workflows Research & e-Science workflows Repositories : institutional, e-prints, subject, data, learning objects Institutional presentation services: portals, Learning Management Systems, u/g, p/g courses, modules Deposit / self-archiving Deposit / self-archiving Validation Validation Publication Resource discovery, linking, embedding Validation Linking Peer-reviewed publications: journals, conference proceedings Quality assurance bodies Data curation: databases & databanks

24. DIGITAL CURATION CENTRE communities of practice: users curation organisations community support & outreach Collaborative Associates Network of Data Organisations management & co-ordination research collaborators services research development testbeds& tools Industry standards bodies

25. TEXT MINING • Text mining attempts to discover new information by applying techniques from data mining, information retrieval, and natural language processing: • identifies and gathers relevant textual sources • analyses these to extract facts involving key entities and their properties • combines the extracted facts to form new facts or to gain valuable insights • finds applications in diverse areas of wide interest such as drug discovery and predictive toxicology, protein interaction, competitive intelligence, protection of the citizen, identification of new product possibilities, detection of links between lifestyle and states of health

26. NATIONAL UK CENTRE FOR TEXT MINING • Jointly funded by JISC, BBSRC and EPSRC • Based at University of Manchester, in partnership with the Universities of Liverpool and Salford. International partners include University of California at Berkeley, University of Geneva, University of Tokyo, and the San Diego Supercomputer Center • A number of aims (see next slide) • http://www.cse.salford.ac.uk/nactem/

27. e-LEARNING FRAMEWORK • Development of a common technical framework • Open source • Will facilitate the integration of commercial, home-grown and open source components, and applications within institutions and regional federations by agreeing common service definitions

28. ELF PROJECTS ARE DEVELOPING • Web Service Definitions for component services • Implemented in Web Service Toolkits • Service and client ‘adapters’ • Mainly in Java and .NET, with standardised APIs • Derived from the Web Service Definition Language • Open Source • Liberal ‘commercial use’ licenses • Encourage wide adoption of specifications • Service definitions submitted to specification bodies • IMS only e-Learning body developing Web Service specifications.