Working with the OGSA-DAI folks

I have started putting together a document and am collaborating on it with the folks over at University of Edinburgh who are writing OGSA-DAI code as we read.

The focus is to establish a project for OGSA-DAI on Grid nodes, and I envision that to be a polling framework (so that other programs can select a series of nodes, say "get me data from databases connected to those nodes, merge them (via join or aggregation or union) and send me the results").

More simply, and much sooner, I am documenting and hope to establish a Proof of Concept that will just get data from two test databases on two nodes merged and displayed. The issuing of commands and data transfer needs to be done through Globus (so that the grid security paradigm is maintained). If I can sort out the commands and the workflow for that, it will be the perfect "Hello World" application that shows the essential power of OGSA-DAI and Grid.

Then I can start thinking about how to handle the sort of dynamic commands that will likely need to be built on the fly, and how to handle data resource discovery across different nodes on the grid. And before you know it, grid nodes start getting OGSA-DAI and DBA's at the medical centers start setting up views for data polling and we are able to go "this is the count of various [infection] in [region]"

Cheers!