Minutes of the Data Design team telcon, June 23rd 2004.

1) Early discussion

Roll Call:
  Dave Berry (chair and note taker)
  Gavin McCance, CERN
  Inderpal Nerang, IBM
  Simon Laws, IBM

Agenda Bashing:
Due to the small number of participants, we postponed any discussion about architecture design.

2) Key properties of architecture 

We discussed the three properties noted from the previous telcon and added some new ones.

The first addition is failure tolerance.  This is a generic requirement of Grid that has particular manifestations for some data services.  E.g. if only a subset of sources are available, the data access services should have an option to return partial results.

The second addition is support for different mastering/peering strategies.  E.g. there may be different approaches to the deployment of metadata catalogues, synchronisation and conflicts.  This property is closely related to that of multiple levels of coherency.

We noted that a requestor must be able to specify policy requirements at a high level of abstraction.  The system can then determine the best option for the given policy.    

We also noted that there may be a need to track information quality.  This is a capability related to provenance.  It is crucial when dealing with large-scale heterogeneous data.

We also noted that the data services must integrate with non-service data sets.  E.g. a reliable file transfer may need to transfer data between non-service data sets.

3) Wrap-up.

DONM: 30th June.   This needs to concentrate on planning for the FTF meeting.