Trip Report: D-Grid Hands on

Event: D-Grid All Hands Meeting

Goettingen, 10-12th sept 2007

Participants MPDL: Malte, Wolfgang, Ulla

For presentations, please check Agenda...should be updated in next weeks

For another point of view on D-Grid, and overview on community grids and projects, see two hardcopies of "Die D-Grid initiative" (1x english, 1x german) => available ab sofort in MPDL library/social room A-strasse, section "Neuerwerbungen". Also online under english version and german version

"D-Grid - Millionengrad oder Erfolgsgeschichte?
Critical opening statement by BMBF (H. Loewe), which states deficiencies in:
 * exchange/cooperations between middleware grids and service grids
 * sustainable business models, illustrative usage scenarios for benefits
 * integration/connex of "Wissensmanagement"-Projekte (e.g. eSciDoc) and D-Grid unclear

Keynote Tony Hey, Microsoft Research
useful overview on eScience background/motivation

Microsoft's research areas in eScience:
 * upload/buy storage of data on thwe web
 * data processing / compute on demand
 * visualisation!
 * MASH-UPs
 * digital preservation
 * new forms/tpyes of review/reputation/influence
 * "Live documents" (RSS feeds, blog entries, comments, annotations => publication not static but living)
 * tagging for researcher
 * lab notebook as blog entry

Workshop on "Data"
several presentations on data management tools/engines/languages.

I was hoping for discussions on content/data types and structures, but that was not in the focus.

Workshop on "Knowledge"
several presentations on projects which are connecting the d-grid infrastructure and the on-top "Wissensschicht"/knowledge layer projects.
 * same needs between eScience and d-grid projects:

shared infrastructure, re-use of data and services, semantic enrichment of data and services.
 * focus knowledge layer: re-use, enrichment, provision of data
 * call for demonstration projects and community-driven improvements
 * topics presented:
 * daten lebenszyklus management (data curation )
 * service infrastructure: link services, semantic description of services, register services, make them re-usable
 * Wissensvermittlung/transfer of knowledge (Weikum, MPI-INF and Matthias from FIZ K.)

Presentation of projects "Wissensmanagement/Wissensvernetzung"
was the most interesting afternoon for me...


 * hyperImage: Cmopare images and semantic of images => supports discourse on specific image details. HyperImage Editor allows marking details in the image, link to other details, automatic indexes, links (no semantic enrichment on type of relation), concordances (images in their context).
 * ontoverse: tool to conceptualize, cooperatively develop ontologies, support of different phases of ontology development, incl kind of quality assurance. currently domain of bio-informatics
 * stemnet: create relations between unstructured freetext (= article) and structured data, using technologies for semantic interoperability. morphosyntactic analysis of text data => recognize text entities and classify them, normalize text entities based on structured ressources like databases and ontologies, support non-conventional search patterns, support visualisation of semantical metadata.
 * wikinger: algorithms for recognition of named entities (persons, organisation, products, locations). semi-automatic generation of semantical relations between entities

High prios for future D-Grid activities
sustainability, support, AAI/VO, legal issues, develop/improve their business models to prove sustainability (Nachhaltigkeit) and user-centered service level definitions