Notes from the GGF15 OGSA Data WG session on Data Transfer.

The straw man proposal presented may make a base for building a generic transfer architecture.  It needs more development to be sure.

Is it sufficient to specify the protocol to establish the transfer mechanism, e.g. FTP for files, some other protocol (possibly to be defined) for database tables?

As a result of this, we may have several URLs for the same source or sink, one for each supported protocol.  We can have a registry that maps an abstract name to a list of URLs, signifying different protocols (or different replicas in a replicated system).  Therefore we will need a selection service, which takes a list of URLs and selects an appropriate one.

The key is the access protocol: given a name, how does the system access the data.  Possibly we could separate the access protocol from the transfer protocol (current protocols don't do this).

OGSA will want data transfer to understand WS-Names (which are a particular type of EPRs), instead of or in addition to URLs.

OGSA data transfer will have to cope with various forms of authorisation mechanisms.