JISC

Workpackage

Start / Finish 

Budget

 Owner

 Description

Research Projects to showcase e-Science facilities applied to A&H Research

Sep-07 to
Mar-09

£ 600,000

AB

Research projects, and/or resources to showcase e-Science facilities applied to A&H Research (call circulated in September of 2006, to be awarded in September 2007). Funding will be pooled with AHRC's and EPSRC’s matched funds. The projects will be part of the AHRC e-Science Initiative, which will have a transforming impact in developing ICT expertise in Arts and Humanities enabling researchers to develop and work with digital resources and facilitating collaboration, not only within their own fields, but with researchers in other subjects and disciplines.

Effective Data Curation with Disciplinary Focus

Jan-07 to
Mar-09

£ 500,000

HH

The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) will scope and carry out a programme of activities to get a better understanding of discipline-specific requirements and their impact on data curation, and to promote effective data curation practices tailored to suit the disciplinary needs of the researchers. This work will complement DCC’s current activities and will also allow them to build on it in the future - they will be able to provide discipline-specific support to help researchers dealing with the practical issues of data retention and data management during the data lifecycle.

Barriers to Take-Up of e-Infrastructure Services

Mar-07 to
Mar-09

£ 400,000

AB

The broader take up and effective use of the e-Infrastructure will depend on an understanding of the benefits to be gained and confidence in its use. The proposed activity is a phased approach to identify barriers to take-up of a selection of 'e-infrastructure services' and to address these through research, user engagement, training and awareness-raising, and assessment. The work will be underpinned by a user requirements exercise focusing on ‘early adopters’ of these services and the resources (e.g. ‘e-science’ tools, datasets, documentation) that these services may provide. A baseline will be established to address issues of take-up.  The effectiveness of the process will be assessed and fed into the project activity and to service delivery where applicable.

Support for Research: Tools & Standards

Mar-07 to Mar-09

£ 325,000

AB

This strand aims to extend ICT support of the research community in the provision of advice about, and consolidation of, existing and burgeoning technical standards and e-infrastructure tools (e.g. middleware, standard APIs, and web service protocols) that are in development and used by the research community. As part of the activity, resources will be made available to promote awareness of the range of standards and tools, and include the provision of unbiased recommendations for both open and adopted tools and standards. The work builds upon a range of core activity within the UK, as well as international developments. The work is intended to inform and contribute to the JISC e-Framework for Education and Research.

Use Cases and Service Usage Models

Mar-07 to Mar-09

£ 225,000

AB

The strand aims to better understand how the research community of users actually engage with e-infrastructure tools and technologies to solve or address specific research problems or processes. One way is to collect use cases and to engage in some form of evaluative and comparative work. For example, disciplinary comparisons of certain e-infrastructure component use, and evaluation of new use cases showing how these advance usability. The intended outcome is a more accurate overview of the current and new landscape of working methodologies and use and to progress toward a consensus on best practice and cross-working opportunities. The work will be undertaken in close collaboration with the JISC e-Framework initiative in the establishment of Service Usage Models (SUMS) and service expressions drawn from the use cases.

Identity Management and Levels of Assurance

Oct-06 to Oct-08

£ 650,000

JF

The OST Working Group for AAA, Middleware and DRM highlighted the importance of both identity management and level of assurance to achieve the requirements of the proposed e-Infrastructure for research within the UK. This work-area will begin to take this work forward, looking at institutional capabilities for managing identity to support virtual organisations, the user’s experience in terms of managing personal identity across affiliations and in terms of understanding authentication strength, and looking at the national requirements for managing levels of assurance within certificates and attributes. It will look at implementing ‘appropriate authentication’ for resources in terms of authentication strength across research resources.

Developing and enhancing federated tools and services

Mar-07 to
Mar-09 

£ 975,000

JF

Integration of Grid and Shibboleth and vice versa: Projects such as SHEBANGS, ESP-GRID, Grid-Shib and Shib-Grid have shown what can be achieved but further work is needed to widen the scope of what is known. All work should be in conjunction with the National Grid Service (NGS).

• Developing and applying n-tier web service architectures: As portals are developed further it will become increasingly important to resolve n-tier web services. There is already existing work on this area, such as the SPIE project, that should be used to inform work. Bids within this sub-area will establish national consensus.
• Applying existing virtual home for identity solutions: There are now several solutions to virtual home for identities, such as ProtectNetwork meaning that the remaining work to be done to implement them is within development of use cases for their application, tie in with levels of assurance on authorisation and selection of a service that could be used in conjunction with the UK Access Management Federation.

Virtual Organisation Management Tools and Services

Mar-07 to
Mar-09

£ 525,000

JF

The arrival of SAML 2.0 and the potential new capabilities of Shibboleth within this area mean  it is likely projects focusing on software outputs within this area will be split into two phases. The first will be to consolidate and review existing national and international developments on VOs (such as Grouper and Signet) and take into account the potential of new developments and the second phase will be to produce demonstrators that take account of the new capabilities within SAML 2.0 and Shibboleth. The primary focus of projects should be on grid-based virtual organisations. Priority will be given to tools that move the agenda forwards and not simply new ways of carrying out the same tasks that do not interwork.

OMII

Oct-06 to Mar-09 

£ 900,000

MD

The Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute has seen recent changes as it has moved into Phase 2 of its development, with the UK-based arm being retitled OMII-UK. The vision for OMII-UK is for it to become the source for reliable, interoperable and open-source Grid middleware. Funding will be used for creating production versions of specific essential software and services needed for e-Infrastructure, in particular the UK NGS, whilst taking into account production software that is already in existence. As such the JISC and the NGS will stand as the 'customer' for these developments.

NGS

Oct-06 to Oct-08 

£ 2,000,000

MD

The NGS is the core UK grid, intended for the production use of computational and data grid resources. NGS is part-funded by JISC, and is run by the Grid Operations Support Centre. The work will cover project management, the support centre, core node deployment and operations, resource and partner integration and monitoring, sustainability and business plan, application support, outreach, training and user documentation, core service development and updating the NGS technology and service roadmap.

Accounting/Usage monitoring - FEC readiness

Jan-07 
to Mar-09

£ 400,000

JF

Accounting and usage monitoring centres around tracking the consumption of system resources by users. It is most commonly used for access to the Internet, where a service provider such as Ukerna needs to know how much capacity to provide to ensure that everyone can have access and be able to do what they want to. The current issue is that there are many resources that are free at point of use, a good example being the National Grid Service, and to ensure fair access for everyone there needs to be an awareness of how much the resource is being used and by whom. This is not necessarily easy to address due to the multitude of different ways of measuring resource consumption at the hardware level. The work will consist of a study put out to ITT for £100K and a call for projects £300K to address the issues raised under the ITT.

Text Mining

May-06 to Jun-08

£ 500,000

JF

The National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM) are currently involved in a three year project, part funded by JISC, to explore how text mining can be used within the bio-medical area to further research. Therefore, it is proposed to extend these activities from the bio-medical sphere into social sciences, and beyond that into further domains such as Arts and Humanities through a community call for a small number of institution-led projects and a community call for a small number of institution-led projects.

Service registry

Sep-07 to Mar-09 

£ 200,000

MD

This workpackage consist of ITTs to develop and run an experimental registry service, which may later become a production service. The registry services would serve two purposes – an immediate requirement to allow the publishing and discovery of e-Research (in particular GRID and e-Science) services, and the longer term needs of semantic description and discovery of services as required by workpackages D3 and D4. As such the registry technologies used must be extensible and providers prepared to implement technologies as required by the projects in D3 and D4. The service providers would also need to produce sustainability roadmap for the registry services.

Semantically co-ordinating resources and services across registries

Mar-07 to Mar-09

£ 500,000

MD

The intention of the call is to build on existing activity within the UK and internationally to develop demonstrators for semantic models for automating research. Bidders will need to choose one of the following areas with the option of choosing from a range of supporting threads, which are:

• Build upon the existing JISC e-Infrastructure and Information Environment, and demonstrate the integration of resources and services from existing JISC services, such as the IE Registry Services, data and information services (such as datasets at MIMAS), e-infrastructure and grid services (e.g. NGS ), and advisory services (e.g. DCC).
• Look at data issues crossing the traditional library and e-Science domains to bridge the gap between metadata for services, data, and published literature, both with respect to content and with respect to security, custodianship, long-term preservation and rights of use. In particular, involve partnership of grid/e-Science technology experts with domain researchers and experts from the information environment and digital library communities.

Collaboration across VO's

Sep-07 to Mar-09

£ 300,000

MD

This strand has two specific aims:

• Whilst VOs can currently be built without semantics, the first aim of this strand is to examine the ways in which e-Infrastructure can become more semantically-aware in order to allow collections of resources (e.g. computing, storage, data sets, digital libraries, scientific instruments) and people (e.g. researchers) to come together to form virtual organisations. This is intended to ease the job of the researcher.
• Secondly, there still remains a need to understand the process of collaboration in e-Science and in the e-Research communities.