Session Hopping, LinkedData, and Data APIs at OGF25 in Sicily
04 March 2009
Catania, Sicily, Italy
Open Grid Forum 25th Conference (OGF25)
[Note: I'm posting my backlog of updates from the past 2 months of travel. An update specifically about the OGF Repositories Workshop will follow shortly]
I made it to the conference center in Catania, Sicily a few hours before the OGF Repositories Workshop. Immediately upon arriving I met Nick Ferguson, coordinator of the workshop, and had a nice chat with Neil Chue Hong about repositories, ORE, and grid computing vs. cloud computing. After that I was left to kill time until the workshop by sitting in on one of the OGF sessions. At first, I stepped into what I thought was the Earth Sciences session, but it turned out to be the Computational Chemistry session and went way over my head. I then passed through a handful of other random presentations before settling on a room where about 30 people were having a discussion about XQuery.
I soon discerned that this group was hammering out the spec for some sort of standard data systems interface. When I arrived, they had been debating the strengths and demerits of XPath/XQuery vs. SQL as a query language. The converation quickly stumbled into the pit of interoperability hell. Standard interjections abounded: “Some implementations won’t have that data to return…”, “you will have to expose user info in order to support that…” mumble mumble “… we didn’t do it that way because one unnamed vendor couldn’t support it…” I nearly laughed out loud when an attendee from the back of the room interrupted the discussion declaring “But in most situations, you should only be returning items owned by the current user.”
I still had no idea what data they were attempting to expose. (I later learned that it was the RUS-WG, who are defining a standard interface for retrieving job usage records … Obscure indeed.) The 90-minute discussion ended up having nearly nothing to do with the actual data these people want to work with. Instead, the conversation was entirely dominated by the travails of navigating the strange space of Data API design.
Meanwhile, serendipitously, I was using this downtime (and the conference wifi access) to finally read George Thomas’s slides about recovery.gov publishing open data. Though I missed the presentation, the slides spell out the project’s intentions pretty clearly. They’re full of references to REST, ATOM, RDFa and the LOD cloud. I experienced such a fascinating contrast between the exposition before my eyes and the discussion filtering in through my ears. In particular, one of Thomas’s slides jumped out at me. The slide, titled “Follow the dollar, not the person”, showed a semantic model for users, user groups, and posts in a bulletin-board style Community Forum system. It was totally readable, totally understandable, precise, flexible, and using an ontology that lends itself to re-use.
Over the past year, I have satirically placed a golden halo above “linked data” in my mind. As I sat in the RUS-WG session, light fell upon that halo and it glowed.
This experience, as well as consequent discussions at OGF, has left me with a distinct sense that there’s a pattern here. We are all, of our own accord and in our own little techno-fiefdoms, attempting to do the same things and running into the same challenges. I think that the previously obscure field of digital repositories has valuable perspective to provide and many pieces of wisdom to share in this domain. I hope to see more public discourse about these topics, and I know who to start prodding to speak up. Watch this space.
Post Script:
The morning following my OGF session-hopping experience, I realized that the track I had passed over, innocuously titled “HEP”, was a meeting of the High Energy Physics community. In particular, it was primarily a discussion about how they are going to handle processing the data outputs from the LHC experiments when they fire up the collider later this year. /me kicks himself for missing this.