Difference between revisions of "Virtual Research Environments Deployment and Operation: Plan"

Revision as of 19:07, 18 October 2012

The iMarine project is expected to deploy and operate a number of Virtual Research Environments (VREs) to satisfy the needs of its community.

The set of Virtual Research Environments (VREs) iMarine operates as well as their evolution in terms of resources involved and services offered is a consequence of the analysis of the requirements captured by the Ecosystem Approach Community of Practice. In addition to that, others scenarios are expected to spring up and be analysed during the project lifetime as a consequence of the expression of interests coming from external communities, i.e. communities that are not part of the iMarine consortium. The analysis phase is followed by a deployment phase, i.e. the activity leading to the development and evolution of the identified VOs and VREs.

Analysis Phase

The analysis phase is expected to be continuous, i.e. VREVirtual Research Environment. "managers" (both users playing the role of VRE Designer or VRE Manager), have to deal with novel scenario specifications with no planned schedule as well as with revised versions of existing scenario specifications resulting from the exploitation of the released services with no fixed schedule.

The result of the analysis phase is documented below from both the development and deployment phases. Overall, it leads to the identification of Virtual Research Environments to be deployed as well as actions governing the evolution of the deployed VREs, e.g. deploy a new function, add a new data source. In some cases, namely data source integration and vertical applications (i.e. applications specifically conceived to combine community specific applications and tools with gCube facilities offered through the APIs), this lead to development tasks.

Development Phase

The technology underlying the creation and operation of Virtual Research Environments largely depend on gCube features. However, specific technology might have to be developed in order to:

• integrate existing data sources and tools, i.e. to make these resources exploitable through VREs services;
• implement new or enhanced versions of graphical user interfaces, i.e. to offer the plethora of gCube facilities through user-oriented and web-based graphical interfaces;

as to serve the needs of the Ecosystem Approach CoPCommunity of Practice. as expressed in the requirements area of this Wiki. Because of the nature of these activities - software development tasks characterised by short development life-cycles - the project team relies on the project TRAC tool, i.e. development tasks are described through a number of TRAC tickets. Thus a comprehensive and updated view of the planned development activities can be obtained by accessing such a tool. A brief report of the major developments is reported below.

Concerning data sources and tools integration, the following developments have been planned:

• Plug-ins for the Species Discovery Service to interface with species data repositories, e.g. OBIS data source (Task #41) and GBIF data source (Task #42);
• Enhancements of the OpenSDMX suite to support the publishing of Code List through SDMX;

Concerning graphical user interfaces development, the following developments have been planned:

• Enhanced version of the Workspace portlet, e.g. functional enhancements (Task #216);
• Enhanced version of the Resources Management portlet, e.g. functional enhancements (Task #234, Task #257);

Deployment Phase

To meet the expectations of the above scenarios, the iMarine supports the operation of the following Virtual Research Environments (VREs operated in the context of a number of Virtual Organisations). For each of them the current state is reported as well as the plans governing the evolution from the following points of view:

• data, i.e. the data sources made available through them;
• functional, i.e. the functionality supported by them;
• software, i.e. the version of the gCube technology supporting their operation.

FARM VOVirtual Organization; Development Plan and State

This Virtual Organisation has been deployed to serve the Fisheries and Aquaculture Resources Management community.

gCubeApps VOVirtual Organization; Development Plan and State

This Virtual Organisation has been created to serve the needs of the any community willing to experience with specific applications supported by the gCube technology.