High-Yield Public Health-Related Grid Services-Food for Thought

Had a very productive meeting with my colleagues today- around defining a handful of very high-yield and valuable services to be added to the core Globus services - which might be included with each Grid node.  

The conclusion was the development of 3 very elegant, distinct and lightweight services that would be able to perform the following - given successful node installation:

1.  Alerting to all (or a subset) of the members of the grid community.  To improve the granularity of the notification, this service could leverage some form of the existing PHIN Directory developed by CDC.

2.  Instant Messaging / Grid Chat - for those who want rapid communication / collaboration functionality between members of the PH Grid community.

3.  A vocabulary service to facilitate the rapid standardization of local data sets, to facilitate data sharing and integration.  As the use case for this service is refined, it is our hope that it can remain a very streamlined and lightweight service.

Given the availability of these services, a Grid portal must be created as well, to provide a user interface for all nodes/users to turn on/off the activity of these services.  

Of course, all these services would only be available to those with digital certificates.    And yes, the scaling of the digital certificate issues must be addressed, regardless of the other issues brought up in this post.

Look forward to further discussion on this.