Charter for ARI-WG Date 2010-10-28 Group Abbreviation: ari-wg Group Name: Access to Remote Instrumentation in a distributed environment – Working Group Area: Group Leadership: Marcin Plociennik marcinp@man.poznan.pl Chair Duane Edgington duane@mbari.org Chair Milan Prica milan.prica@elettra.trieste.it Chair Michael Sutter Michael.Sutter@ipe.fzk.de Secretary Group Summary: This working group is spawned by RISGE-RG and will focus its effort on providing a Shared Information Model (SIM) and defining concrete interfaces for accessing remote instruments. There is a need in the community for accessing remote instruments by using standard interfaces that are well defined and specified by standard approaches/procedures. The main purpose of this working group will be to standardize approaches in remote access interfaces to instruments through our SIM. Target devices are all kind of instruments including distributed sensor networks. As such, it concerns mostly the services for steering and monitoring instrument resources, granting security and authorization (policy), accessing combined or multiple devices, performing a calibration phase, and also services for acquiring data from instruments ,operating on files and streams. Charter Focus/Purpose and Scope: The initial RISGE-RG collected a number of use cases which are published in the RISGE-RG Document “RISGE-RG Collection of Use Cases” (GFD-I.168). The effort of this working group will be focused initially on these use cases, also taking into account the standards and use cases in the field of sensors (OGC – SWE) and the CIMA interface and implementation. During its work, the group will consider the outcome of other groups such as GLUE , but also SAGA and OGSA ByteIO. One of the main objectives to be achieved is simplicity of the interfaces, which will create the standard SIM to assure reliable implementations. The group will work on the recommendation document (Specification 1.0) for defining interfaces in the new SIM for accessing the remote instruments. The WG will also continue to identify projects outside OGF with similar focus and goals and will seek their input in the development and implementation of the services. Exit Strategy: The group will finish its work after the publication of the Services Specification as OGF standard recommendation accompanied by the availability of at least one reference implementation. The group is planning to reach out to the end users to get feedback from the field and also to collaborate with other OGF working groups as well as with OGC to make ARI better aligned with them. Goals/Deliverables: Title: ARI-WG Specification V1.0 Type: Recommendation Document Milestone Date (YYYY-MM) Completed? Completed Date (YYYY-MM) First Draft 2011-04 Public Comment Publication Title: Type: Select Document Type... Milestone Date (YYYY-MM) Completed? Completed Date (YYYY-MM) First Draft Public Comment Publication Seven Questions: 1. Is the scope of the proposed group sufficiently focused? Yes. The main purpose of this working group will be to standardize approaches through a Shared Information Model and defining remote access interfaces to devices such as scientific instrumentation and sensors regardless of their size and complexity. 2. Are the topics that the group plans to address clear and relevant for the Grid research, development, industrial, implementation, and/or application user community? Yes. The topics relate to accessing remote devices in distributed systems, like Grid and cloud computing environments. Standardized methods for accessing remote instruments is very important for Grid research and development since it adds data sources that are fundamental in scientific workflows to computing and storage resources thus enabling system level science. The need for such an extension has been voiced by a number of application user communities. 3. Will the formation of the group foster (consensus-based) work that would not be done otherwise? Yes, the group assembles worldwide work on integrating Remote Instrumentation in Grids with the intention of producing standardized interfaces. The procedures of OGF and its inclusion in the OGF environment are suitable for this kind of work, since it also concerns adding remote instruments as an additional type of resource. 4. Do the group's activities overlap inappropriately with those of another OGF group or to a group active in another organization such as IETF or W3C? This work is complementary to efforts done within OGF. As mentioned in the charter, there are groups and standards within OGC that are appropriately covering some aspects of the instruments and resources mentioned in this charter (but they do not cover Grid environments aspects). This group is going to collaborate closely with OGC and a contact has been already established with that organization. 5. Are there sufficient interest and expertise in the group's topic, with at least several people willing to expend the effort that is likely to produce significant results over time? Yes, there have been and there currently are people involved in the design and implementation on a subset of the aforementioned services. We would like to mention some representatives here of the following active projects: DORII (http://www.dorii.eu), AUGERACCESS (http://www.augeraccess.net), VLab (http://vlab.psnc.pl), SENSORS (http://www.mbari.org/rd/sensors/sensors.htm, http://www.mbari.org/rd/sensors/2004workshop.htm), OOI-CI (http://ci.oceanobservatories.org/ ), OMF (http://security.ncsa.uiuc.edu/wiki/Observatory_Middleware_Framework_(OMF) and of the following past projects: GRIDCC (http://www.gridcc.org), RinGRID (http://www.ringrid.eu), CYCLOPS (http://www.cyclops-project.eu/). 6. Does a base of interested consumers (e.g., application developers, Grid system implementers, industry partners, end-users) appear to exist for the planned work? Yes. There are a number of existing communities and users already very interested in this work. They already have an active role in the projects that have been mentioned in the response to question 5. 7. Does the OGF have a reasonable role to play in the determination of the technology? Yes. The use of remote instrumentation services with a standard way in distributed environments like Grid is becoming more and more important. The proposed work expects to build upon experience gained in other OGF groups, like for example GLUE group. Group Status: Requested Public Description (for print & web site): This working group is spawned by RISGE-RG and will focus its effort on providing a Shared Information Model (SIM) and defining concrete interfaces for accessing remote instruments. There is a need in the community for accessing remote instruments by using standard interfaces that are well defined and specified by standard approaches/procedures. The main purpose of this working group will be to standardize approaches in remote access interfaces to instruments through our SIM. Target devices are all kind of instruments including distributed sensor networks. As such, it concerns mostly the services for steering and monitoring instrument resources, granting security and authorization (policy), accessing combined or multiple devices, performing a calibration phase, and also services for acquiring data from instruments ,operating on files and streams.