| Appendix E: | Date: 5 May 1997 |
| Subject: CINTEX Workshop April 1997 | |
| Meeting Date: 13 April 1997 | Place: Toulouse, France |
Present: BNSC Brian Thomas |
Copies: Participants + cintex-disc |
Table Of Contents:
1. Interoperability Testing Status of Servers and Gateway Installations
2. Status of NASDA Bridge Hashi 2
3. New V0 IMS Messages
4. User Feedback
5. Federation Management
6. Proposals for Improvements of WWW/IMS Gateway
7. Data Distribution Discussion
8. Help Desk Coordination
9. Status of CIP Prototyping Activities
10. Planning for an Interoperable CINTEX CIP Prototype
11. Task Team Chair
1. Interoperability Testing Status of Servers and Gateway Installations
Yonsook Enloe summarised the testing status of all international IMS servers outside the United States. Servers which passed all interoperable tests are classified as operational servers, all other servers are classified as development servers. The following table summarises the status of all servers and gives also an overview on the supported V0 IMS functions.
2. Status of NASDA Bridge Hashi 2
The NASDA Hashi 2 Bridge enables users of the NASDA EUS Client to access all catalogues with V0 IMS server. A first version of the bridge was finalised in March 1997. This version supports only inventory searches. Other IMS features like browse and order are not yet implemented.
NASDA is now considering three options to extend the interoperability with other systems:
3. New V0 IMS Messages
The extended V0 IMS protocol includes new messages to support the following additional features:
Detailed descriptions of these IMS extensions can be found under the following URL:
The current release of the EOSDIS V0 Gateway has already been extended to support some of these messages. A version supporting all messages will be available in early 1998.
The V0 IMS server should now be upgraded to support the following features:
End of October the following additional extensions should be implemented:
4. User Feedback
Yonsook Enloe presented the user statistics which were collected by the central installation of the EOSDIS V0 Web Gateway. These statistics contain also user actions at all international installations of the Web Gateway. The following table summarises these statistics.
The sessions refer to real user sessions and not to single user actions. Also the access from Web crawlers is not contained in these figures.
The information was derived from the log files of the gateway. The log files contain much more information which makes it possible to derive also other statistics. In particular the gateway logs every user action and stores the IP adress together with the action.
It was discussed whether further information should be contained in the user statistic. One proposal was to separate frequent users from 'one time' users (e.g. via the IP address). Other proposals referred to the type of data which was searched or how often certain parts of the system were used.
User feedback could be also collected by the help desks. This feedback should then be collected from the local help desks by the federation level help desk.
5. Federation Management
Richard Goebel gave a short summary on the status of the federation management. An open issue is still the decision making process. Richard Goebel proposed the following guidelines as the basis for analysing the decision making process:
Since the harmonisation of decisions is a difficult process, the number of decisions which need to be harmonised should be reduced to the absolute required minimum.
For the management of a distributed interoperable catalogue system Richard Goebel suggests to distinguish between agencies providing catalogues and agencies providing the interoperable infrastructure. The term 'interoperable infrastructure' refers to all required software and hardware components (e.g. clients, web gateways, middleware, network links) and also to groups or tasks which are required to maintain the distributed interoperable catalogue system (e.g. Federation Level Help Desk).
With this two types of contributions the following responsibilities are given:
Now the following approach was suggested to minimise the number of decisions which need to be agreed:
Note that this approach does not mean that the providers of the infrastructure are totally free to make arbitrary decisions on the definition of the interoperable protocol. In fact these providers have a vital interest in getting as many catalogues as possible into their distributed system. This means that interests of the catalogue providers have to be respected because otherwise few or even no catalogues would be available.
In this context groups like the CINTEX task team can be used to collect proposals from catalogue providers and to discuss consequences of decisions. But the CINTEX task team (nor any other similar group) is the decision making group for the distributed interoperable catalogue system.
The harmonisation effort can be limited if not two many agencies are involved in the provision of the interoperable infrastructure (e.g. not more than three agencies?). It seems to be also sensible that a group of agencies providing such an infrastructure decides themself about new agencies contributing to this task.
The suggested approach was discussed by the task team but no agreement could be achieved. The discussion will be continued in future telecons or meetings.
6. Proposals for Improvements of WWW/IMS Gateway
During this meeting the following proposals were made:
Yonsook Enloe informed the task team that the meeting of the WWW task team will be another oppertunity to propose improvements of the gateway.
7. Data Distribution Discussion
Jim Closs presented a NASA solution to overcome problems with data distribution from Russia. At present the Russian mail system (normal mail not email) seems to be not completely reliable. Therefore NASA has established a mechanism that data is first transferred to NASA via a controlled mechanism and then distributed to the user.
The task team discussed whether this approach is also applicable for data distribution from other countries. During the meeting no other countries with a similar mail problem were identified. But other agencies could consider to establish a similar approach if they want to provide Russian data to their users.
8. Help Desk Coordination
Jim Closs reported on the status of the CINTEX Federation Help Desk. The task of the CINTEX Federation Level Help Desk will support the local help desks and coordinate their activities. For this purpose the Federation Level Help Desk will:
9. Status of CIP Prototyping Activities
Marc Gorman gave an overview on the ESA activities related to CIP. ESA is currently implementing the ESA Earthnet Online System which is committed to use CIP as an interface to the outside world. In addition ESA currently evaluates the use of CIP also for system internal interoperability.
Beneath the development of this operational system ESA is funding the following prototype activities related to CIP:
George Percival reported on the NASA prototyping activities related to CIP. NASA will reuse the software from the CEO demonstrator project to establish an interoperable link between a test catalogue and the CIP. For this purpose a catalogue translator will be implemented connecting this catalogue with the Retrieval Manager from the demonstrator project. In addition NASA will implement an ICS gateway supporting the access from the ECS client to the CIP domain.
10. Planning for an Interoperable CINTEX CIP Prototype
The task team identified the following steps for establishing an interoperable CIP prototype:
The task team discussed the components of the interoperable CIP prototype for the first step. The identified components and their interfaces are summarised in Figure1.
Figure1: Components of Interoperable CIP Prototype
The task team agreed on the following schedule to implement this prototype:
1. Catalogue Translator accessible
2. Installation of Retrieval Manager and Population of Collection DB
3. Local Test of Configuration
July -31. July
4. Configuration of distributed system (e.g. global collection):
July - 31. July
5. Interoperable Testing
1. August - 31. August
6. Test of ESA Java Client:
1. August - 31. August
Note that this schedule is strongly dependent on the availability of the demonstrator software. The current schedule is based on the assumption that the software will be available before June 1997.
11. Task Team Chair
Richard Goebel retires from the CINTEX task team chair. He suggests Yonsook Enloe as the new task team leader. The CINTEX task team confirms this proposal.