The myGrid Information Model for myGrid v2

Many of the detailed documents on the deployment of the InformationModel are available as attachements to the Wiki page MyGridInformationRepository.

Information Model initial notes Jul 2003

These notes arise from a preliminary discussion between MarkGreenwood, ChrisWroe and NickSharman on 17 Jul 2003. They and PeterLi will 'own' and coordinate work on the information model for the next phase of myGrid.

At IntegrationFest5, we decided to expand the group to:

• MarkGreenwood
• ChrisWroe
• NickSharman
• PeterLi
• NedimAlpdemir
• JustinFerris
• TomOinn

The current vesion is at infomodel-1.3.doc (MS Word format). You can track the evolution of the information model (including a Together UML version) in our CVS repository.

The Purpose of an Information Model

An information model aims to describe the entities of interest to a particular information system and/or in a particular application domain. Information models are also known as analysis or domain models. The information model should be rich enough that we can express all our requirements of the application in terms of its entities and their attributes and relationships.

It should be the basis of design for the application, and many of its entities/attributes/relations will have analogues in interface specifications, implementation class diagrams, database schemas and code.

In our case, myGrid is the information system and its application domain is e-Science (and particularly e-biology/bioinformatics).

Inputs to the Information Model

The overall requirement for myGrid is to support e-Science; from the original proposal, we take this to include:

• Supporting the scientific process

• Suppporting the scientist's use of the community's information

• Supporting scientific collaboration

We believe that this will require support for a range of metadata to describe documents, services, workflows and other user-defined entities, and especially to support questions of the provenance of these entities.

Knowledge of the application domain

We need to be aware of and can make use of the work of other groups in this area. Some relevant projects include:

• The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative identifies metadata that supports notions of information resource description applicable across multiple domains

• The CLRC Scientific Metadata Model - version 1 supports the description of scientific projects, experiments and their investigators (Note: version 2 is now available).

• The Scholarly Ontologies Project has developed explicit models of scientific claim and refutation that we can exploit in modelling experimental structure and building provenance records

• To support collaboration, we need to model organizations, teams and individual users. The AKT Project has developed ontologies (especially the 'portal' ontology) that address this area

• The Stanford Protégé Project also lists a number of ontologies that address these areas.

Our work to date

We will build on earlier work on the information model (see MyGridInformationRepository and InformationDescription). An initial review has identified the following areas of the information model as needing attention:

• Organizational: Organization, Project, User

• Awareness of change: Notification, Subscription

• Scientific process: WorkContext, Project, Experiment

• Evolution and Mutability

Since we think that the services developed so far play help us support e-Science, we can analyse them (and particularly their interfaces) to discover elements that should appear in the information model.

The requirements

To make the requirements concrete and their satisfaction visible, we aim to support the work of the Graves' Disease project at Newcastle. PeterLi and AnilWipat have been working with the GD team to develop the GravesDisease scenario.

Robert Stevens has identified a set of questions that a scientist might reasonably ask of a myGrid system; AlansLabBookStoryBoard is also a valuable source of requirements.

-- NickSharman - 18 Jul 2003, 22 Sep 2003, 26 Feb 2004

• taverna-architecture-20040227.doc: Exploring taverna 0.1beta8 compared to info. model