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The
Advanced Applications
Database (AAD) : About AAD
|
About The Advanced Applications Database (AAD)
The NLANR Advanced Applications
Database provides a wealth of information on applications and resources, with pointers to many research groups
in many fields across the country and around the world. At present this collection includes over 4,000 applications,
projects, and resources from more than 30 countries with nearly 1,000 contact personnel.
At first, the Advanced Applications database included basic information
about the NSF HPC awards: projects, participants, and institutions.
Later the database grew to include more detailed information about technical
requirements of the applications and results of application research. Once
the NSF HPC information was in place we worked with staff of the Internet
2/Abilene community to see that their data were incorporated.
We believe that there are at least three different communities
who would make use of this content:
- Researchers and faculty who would want to use the data collection to identify
those who were working with related technologies in order to build partnerships
or else to determine potential competitors.
- User and resource support personnel who would be charged with assisting
new users, and/or helping identify similar activities their clients could
benefit from.
- Administrators who would look for communities of disciplines or applications
clustered by network requirements or by technology.
No doubt there are other uses for such a database, but these are the most readily
identified.
Because there will be other data collections of similar content, we have worked
with other organizations to ensure that such data collections would be part
of an larger coordinated system to exchange information. For example, we met
with staff of the National High Performance Computing and Communications Software
Exchange (NHSE). This group has built upon a number of industry standards to
permit easy access to software repositories using web-based browsers and search
engines. This model might be something that the AAD may adapt at a
later time.
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Evolution of the Advanced Applications Database:
-
Collection of information about NSF's 150+ awards: institutions,
participants, projects, award data.
- Creation of a description of user requirements to be followed in the database
design.
- Use the Entity/Relationship (E/R) semantic model as an aid to represent
the database design or schema.
- Normalization of relations obtained by means of the E/R.
- Creation of Conceptual
and Relational Models derived from the normalization process as part of
the documentation.
- Implementation of the Relational Model using Sybase as Relational Database
Management System (RDBMS). The SQL/92 standard was followed as much as possible
in order to make a portable schema.
- Collection of NSF awardee institutions' projects data.
- Institutions without collected NSF awardee projects were informed about
it.
- Classification of projects by discipline areas, and by grid
categories.
- Creation of charts based on distribution of projects by discipline areas, and by grid
categories.
- Collection of information on affiliations' projects where the entity can
be a union; membership in an association, working group, or geographic designation;
or participation in other types of common research communities. Some examples
are Internet2, NPACI, IRIS, CENIC, NYSerNet, or The Great Plains Network.
- Make available a
"Distribution of resources by type" pie chart.
- Expansion of content to international projects. Israel, Germany, Italy among
other countries.
- Increase search options
to "Affiliation", "People", "State", and "Country".
Available a Search
- Example page.
- Web survey
available. Please take some time to complete it. We appreciate your participation.
- Classify resources in discipline areas. Create a "List
of resources by discipline area" report and a "Distribution
of resources by discipline area" pie chart.
- Relate keywords to projects and resources based on their abstract or description.
- Improve Search mechanism with OR/AND logical operators. Please see
The Basics of Advanced Applications Database (AAD) Search for more information.
- Development of a generic Search page that is offered to be pointed to
by different communities, among them Internet2, as part of their frameset
at their web site. Communities using the AAD Search have the responsibility of
creating their top and bottom frames. Please contact us if you would like to use it at your site.
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Current status:
Currently, our work is mainly focused in the following tasks:
i) Review existing projects in order to maintain accurated information,
but also their last status or evolution.
ii) Data entry based on submitted project
data forms, users e-mailed project URLs, or our staff's new browsed project URLs.
iii) Collect resources/tools data used/developed by collected projects,
including asynchronous/synchronous tools.
Collaborations:
- Purdue University:
Dee Schlatter, Purdue's VIPT, has initiated the effort of building an IT clearinghouse.
We have shared with her our experience about building the AAD as well as
our logical model or schema with her database team.
- CENIC
: Our collaboration is based on data, as well as the AAD logical
model or schema sharing. We have been working with Kevin Barron, CENIC's Applications
co-chair, to set up a first draft of CENIC's applications database.
- DOE's
Collaboratory : The AAD will be the
source for DOE National Collaboratories project and resource information.
- Some others who have expressed their interest in the AAD:
- Sally Howe: NCO (National Coordination
Office).
- Richard Hirsch: NSF with the Supercomputing
Program.
- Joe Futrelle, and Mike Folke: NCSA, NEES
project.
- David Landsbergen: Ohio State University.
It's our understanding that David would like to use our database as a
source of information for his work-related survey.
- Christian Allegre has also expressed his interest in collaborating with
us in his goal of designing an applications database
for RISQ (Quebec Scientific Information
Network: network of higher education and research in Quebec).
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Glossary of concepts:
- Project: an activity of research or education
that develops or uses resources.
Some examples:
-
CANADA's SchoolWeb: the project will distribute Internet data to school caches using the television vertical blanking interval(VBI).
-
Access Grid: the Access Grid is the ensemble of resources that can be used
to support human interaction across the grid.
It consists of multimedia display,
presentation and interactions environments, interfaces
to grid middleware, interfaces to visualization environments.
-
Improving water resources management: The goal is to create a computational infrastructure, which includes collaborative visualization tools for predicting events,
preparing for
emergencies, and managing the ecosystem.
-
Applied Genetic Technology (AGTEC) Plant Initiative:
The UGA Applied Genetic Technology (AGTEC) Plant Initiative has
two overall goals: (1) to bring together diverse expertise and
resources in plant biotechnology and (2) to provide facilities that will nurture
and stimulate the development and application of these technologies.
- Resource: technology that a project uses or
develops. This includes: software, hardware, network, or system (combination of
software, hardware, or network).
Some examples:
- EDP tool: EDP is a tool designed to facilitate indexing and processing
of electron diffraction patterns. The program was developed from the existing
processing tool for images, SPECTRA.
- ImmersaDesk: the ImmersaDesk is a drafting table format virtual
prototyping device with a computer operated audio system. Using stereo
glasses and magnetic head and hand tracking, this projection-based system
offers a type of virtual reality that is semi-immersive.
- CORBA: (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) An approach
to cross-platform, cross-language distributed objects developed by the
OMG.
- Emtool: Emtool is a program for display and manipulation of electron
micrographs. It's primary advantage over programs like boxmrc and imagic
is that it is much more interactive and easier to use. It does not do
3d reconstructions, but rather specializes in 2d image manipulation.
- vBNS network: the vBNS is a nationwide network that supports
high-performance, high-bandwidth research applications.
- Affiliation:
An entity that can be a union; membership in an association, a
working group, or a geographic designation; or a participation
in other types of common research communities.
Some examples:
- Internet2:
consortium being led by over 180 universities working in
partnership with industry and government to develop
and deploy advanced network applications and technologies,
accelerating the creation of tomorrow's Internet.
- SURA:
Southeastern Universities Research Association.
Consortium of colleges and universities in 15
southeastern states and the District of Columbia
established in 1980 as a nonstock, nonprofit corporation.
-
Alliance: The National Computational Science Alliance.
Partnership to prototype an advanced computational infrastructure
for the 21st century. It includes more than 50 academic, government,
and industry research partners from across the United States.
-
IRIS:
Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology.
- Project status:
The AAD staff is interested in knowing if a project
evolved, somehow, since last time its information was stored
into the AAD. Therefore, projects are reviewed periodically in order to capture
last stage on them. We named this last stage based on our experience
collecting and reviewing information. At the moment, we consider four
different project status:
1.- ongoing/unchanged: default project status.
No update information is given on a particular project
unless its state is undetermined, extended or completed.
AAD staff reviews ongoing/undetermined/extended
projects periodically.
2.- undetermined: a project is considered undetermined when
the AAD staff cannot establish which is the current stage of
a particular project.
3.- extended: an extended project is a project that, whether
has been extended to a second phase, or has been extended in other project
childs, and is not considered completed.
4.- completed: a project is marked as completed when its objectives
have been accomplished. AAD staff based this decision on the
information provided in the project web site; usually searching for words
like "completed". Additional status information could be loaded
into the AAD when a project is completed like the project became a resource,
project published results, or derived projects as a result of the completion.
Next steps:
The Advanced Applications Database (AAD) will continue to provide access to information about
networked research and education projects, applications, and resources. The NLANR AAD team will
provide ongoing enhancements in functionality and in the depth and breadth of the information in the database as
well as ongoing review and maintenance of existing content.
As an example of an enhancement, the AAD team will be working with particular communities to identify their
projects and resources as a start to developing keyword lists that will be tailored to their specific community of users.
The keyword lists will improve the likelihood of successful term searches for those communities. Keyword lists
will also be passed on to other communities such as libraries or Grid Forum Working Groups to assist them in their
information standards work.
The AAD has the intention of working to more clearly identify requirements of collaboration tools (audio, video,
text, conferencing; peer-to-peer applications; groupware; etc.) and using these rankings to provide an entry point that
would lead AAD users to more information from the NLANR/DAST, as well as other sources. If successful, this
process would evolve into a peer review process of collaboration tools for the emerging Global Grid environment.
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AAD Team:
-
Ester Soriano, Database Chief Architect and Project Leader.
-
Hui Shen, AAD Assistant.
Information and Library Science Graduate Student.
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Advanced
Applications Database ||
Logical Model || Query/Search
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Last reviewed:
December 31, 1969