LSG-RG session GGF8 Seattle, Wednesday 10:00 AM-11:30

Attendance 35

Chairs: Abbas Farazdel, Dave Angulo
Secretary: Larry Ang
Minutes prepared by: Dave Angulo

* Need a leader for a team (subcommittee) to create a document to standardize architecture
* The group might write a document saying what is important in creating a Life Sciences Grid
* Need a leader for a team (subcommittee) to create a document on workflow
* GGF9 & GGF10 working sessions only.
* The group will have once a year workshop with presentations that will become published in a refereed journal (New Generations Computing Magazine)
* The group needs to have subcommittees dividing the life sciences into areas.  Each subcommittee will create a document covering that area.  Example areas: medical informatics, pharmaceuticals, medical imaging, etc.  These areas need to be determined by the group.  Question to group: how should the divisions be made?
* Comment Batra: need an affiliation with Data Grids.
* Comment Mark Miller, UCSD: we need to prioritize and select a couple of things that we can deliver by October.  Workflow, Reference Architecture, Requirements Documents, Survey
* Comment Mark Miller: To what degree do we want to agree on standards?
* Comment: What we really want to generate are requirements or use cases.
* Mark Miller, UCSD: We should target requirements document.  Mark would be happy to lead that.
* Comment Larry Ang: Survey just gives an overview of what is there now, but we need a database of researchers and projects so that people can find collaborators.  Harvard Medical school has such a database that you can search by research area, geographical area.  This goes beyond survey and makes the information really useful.  The question is how to populate such a database.  
* Mark Miller has a simple Excel spreadsheet with some information like this that he generated by memory.  Mark will lead the effort to collect and distribute this information with Karpjou Joung and Vincent Breton.
* Comment (an NCSA person): NCSA has a database of 60,000 applications.  It's at http://dast.nlanr.net
Comment: two problems with survey now (1) questions aren't good (2) people unwilling to fill out.  What is important is the requirements document.
* Comment (Satoshi): The group should start planning now for any workshop in Frankfurt or Hawii.  Also, any discussions should occur on GridForge (which has e-mail capabilities).