AWOB Proposal Appendices

MPDL,GAVO

 PLEASE NOTE: This document was only a draft and is now outdated as the final project proposal is available.

= Intro to Appendices = AWOB had as its core goals four related functionalities, [GL in chronological order]:
 * 1) Facilitating publication of astronomical research data to the Virtual Observatory.
 * 2) Facilitating the creation of enhanced e-publications for the astronomical community.
 * 3) Facilitating the preparation of astronomical research data for usable long term archiving.
 * 4) Facilitating the sharing of data and other resources between collaborations.

AWOB aims to do so by producing a cooperation platform that supports astronomical collaboration on scientific projects by facilitating the communication and sharing of scientific resources (data, documents, notes, thoughts) in well defined [LG coordinated?] projects.

AWOB will consist of one or more core infrastructure components that support the overall organisation, storage and presentation [GL more?]. These will be enhanced with plug-ins for the specific functionalities required for the community. We will not build these core components ourselves, but will use existing platforms. For the plug-ins we will also as much as possible try to use existing techniques, but here also we will write our own componets, some of which have been developed in the participating projects already.

A detailed evaluation, even a comprehensive list of criteria is outside the scope of the current document. The evaluation of both core and plug-in solutions will be performed during the project itself. The core component(s) will be selected early on and the demonstrator will be built with it. An indication of the type of technologies we will look at is provided in appendix A. It is not complete, other solutions may be added to this list as we discover them. Plug-in technolgies will be selected mainly when their functionalities are required during the development of the project. Appendix B shows a first list of solutions that will be evaluated, and some of these will definitly be included. Again this list can at the current time not be comprehensive, and indeed some tools will be more or less suitable depending on the choice of the core solutions(s).

= Appendix A: Core infrastructure technology = Iin the first phase of AWOB we will evaluate various technologies for supporting the core The following technolgies and solutions will be evaluated. Detailed evalutation criteria will be defined during the firsts phase of AWOB, but any component chosen should support as much as possible the following functions:
 * creation of projects, possibly hierarchically organised [GL see zCosmos use case LINK] and associated workspaces; association of users with specific roles to the projects; "1-click publication of results" to LTA/AWOB-public/VO
 * sharing (=upload, storage, versioning, search, retrieval) of scientific data data products;
 * enhancement with/interaction with/linking to tools for visualising, manipulation, analysis and other value added functions;
 * documenting data and enhancing data products with standardised and custom metadata.
 * supporting and tracing discussions, presentations, online meetings [GL second life?], (b)logs [GL "AWOB's twitter"?]
 * It supports discussion, meetings, presentations, logs

Technologies:
 * Web 2.0 These can in general not be used directly as the code is proprietory, but we will use them as inspiration for design and functionalities.
 * Flickr
 * Facebook
 * Content Management Systems Open source versions exists that may be used directly.
 * Plone: Python based
 * Drupal
 * Virtual Research Environments AWOB is a VRE and it is interesting to see what other efforts exist in this area. If possible we could adopt or use one, in other cases to seek inspiration. A possible benefit is that much of the work has been done already, though this may also lead to less flexibility in accomodating specific local constraints.
 * Archer: Australian eSicence project.
 * MyExperiment
 * Research Gate
 * Wiki Wiki-s have many of the functionalitities required by AWOB: authoring, file upload, user management. In fact AWOB might be seen as a wiki for data. Important is that a wiki solution should allow plugins and should eb able to interact with a robust storage system.
 * XWiki: A Java based wiki with advanced mechanisms for supporting plug-ins and workspace management.
 * MediaWiki: The wiki already used by the MPDL. And by Wikipedia.


 * Infrastructures: These are larger components that will be used by AWOB for the lower level functionalities such as data storage and computations.
 * eSciDoc [GL here or in CMS above?]
 * Relational databases: AWOB will allow users to interact with a project specific relational database. They will be able to update and query the database. For example tabular files or FITS binary tables can after upload be turned into database tables seamlessly. We will use whatever RDBMS is suitable.
 * Grid AWOB may want to use (German D-)Grid resources where possible. Espceially if CPU-intensive analysis mustbe supported. For long-term data storage the grid may be less suitable.
 * "the Cloud" May be inspirational, but likely too risky to use for long term resource management

= Appendix B: = Here we present a first list of components and solutions that will be evaluated for their usefulness for supporting specific functions. These may be used by linking to remote services, or they may be "plugged-in".


 * metadata extraction
 * FITS ingestor: tool built by GAVO to extract metadata from FITS files and store these in a relational database.
 * interactivity: discussions, (b)logs, meetings
 * Second Life
 * GoogleWave
 * authoring
 * LaTeX-to-MathML translation stylesheets for equations editing in a web page.
 * communication
 * JSAMP: Java library implementing VO-standard Simple Application Messaging Protocol (SAMP). Allows different desktop aplpications to interact with each other. Also possible to use from within web browser.
 * visualisation
 * Aladin: VO tool for visualing images in FITS files. Available as applet and [SAMP] enabled.
 * visualisation
 * Aladin: VO tool for visualing images in FITS files. Available as applet and [SAMP] enabled.