Collaboratory Update for Winter Quarter, Week 3

This is the start of a weekly mailing that the Evergreen Collaboratory group will be sending out to people involved with our project. We had a great deal of progress this week, including a trip to PNNL, and a meeting with Norm Chonacky.

On our trip to PNNL this Wednesday, we met with Jim Myers (director of collaboratory) for about three hours and discussed the overall Notebook architecture and the proposed experiment form implementation. Many topics were discussed including how the ove rall notebook architecture is likely to change to create a more robust common standard for compatibility with other collaboratories (namely Berkeley and Oakridge National Labs). We then moved on to a discussion on how the new experiment form might be imp lemented to communicate with the current notebook. Jim Myers introduced the concept of notebook objects (NObs) and we discussed how our experiment form will communicate with the notebook using NObs.

We started by defining what a notebook object is. The NOb is the data standard used by the notebook client and editors to pass information back and forth. A NOb consists of key-value pairs. There are several mandatory key-value pairs, including: "au thorName", "objectID", "dateTime", "label", "dataType", "data", "dataRef", and "parentNOb". The actual file information is stored in the data key, and the NOb acts as a wrapper around the file. The National Labs would like to develop a object standard that would provide for a common standard that is scalable, very flexible, and more robust. By wrapping the information into NOb objects, this will be easier and more compatible with the Oakridge (ORNL) and Berkeley collaboratories (LBNL), and an overall standard. Following this discussion, we defined the system calls that the experiment form app let will send to the server. Several calls were discussed including how the applet would authenticate user information, and how file structure information would be passed back to the applet.

During our meeting on Thursday with Norm Chonacky, we discussed the needs of the researchers requesting the experiment entry form. Most of this discussion revolved around the inclusion of metadata with the experiments, and how it would be best to represe nt this metadata. Examples of experimental metadata in this case could include temperate levels, time of experiment, number of trials, and other environmental conditions. It was generally agreed that the provision for metadata into the experiment form w ould be a future issue, and that for our current project it might be best to simply provide an annotations box with the experiment entry form. We also discussed some of the problems that have been experienced in communicating with PNNL through the Evergr een firewall, and how these problems might be avoided in our current work.

As a final note, our group received copies of Iona OrbixWeb (a CORBA compiler), and CU-SeeMe to help in our communications, and are beginning the installation of the Notebook server onto Solduc, with the help of David Metzler.

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