IVOA Recommendation: IVOA Support Interfaces

This document describes the minimum interface that a (SOAP- or REST-based) web service requires to participate in the IVOA. Note that this is not required of standard VO services developed prior to this specification, although uptake is strongly encouraged on any subsequent revision. All new standard VO services, however, must feature a VOSI-compliant interface. This document has been produced by the Grid and Web Services Working Group. It has been reviewed by IVOA Members and other interested parties, and has been endorsed by the IVOA Executive Committee as an IVOA Recommendation. It is a stable document and may be used as reference material or cited as a normative reference from another document. IVOA's role in making the Recommendation is to draw attention to the specification and to promote its widespread deployment. This enhances the functionality and interoperability inside the Astronomical Community

From Bare Metal to Virtual: Lessons Learned when a Supercomputing Institute Deploys its First Cloud

As primary provider for research computing services at the University of Minnesota, the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI) has long been responsible for serving the needs of a user-base numbering in the thousands. In recent years, MSI---like many other HPC centers---has observed a growing need for self-service, on-demand, data-intensive research, as well as the emergence of many new controlled-access datasets for research purposes. In light of this, MSI constructed a new on-premise cloud service, named Stratus, which is architected from the ground up to easily satisfy data-use agreements and fill four gaps left by traditional HPC. The resulting OpenStack cloud, constructed from HPC-specific compute nodes and backed by Ceph storage, is designed to fully comply with controls set forth by the NIH Genomic Data Sharing Policy. Herein, we present twelve lessons learned during the ambitious sprint to take Stratus from inception and into production in less than 18 months. Important, and often overlooked, components of this timeline included the development of new leadership roles, staff and user training, and user support documentation. Along the way, the lessons learned extended well beyond the technical challenges often associated with acquiring, configuring, and maintaining large-scale systems.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, PEARC '18: Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing, July 22--26, 2018, Pittsburgh, PA, US

Applying semantic web services to enterprise web

Enterprise Web provides a convenient, extendable, integrated platform for information sharing and knowledge management. However, it still has many drawbacks due to complexity and increasing information glut, as well as the heterogeneity of the information processed. Research in the field of Semantic Web Services has shown the possibility of adding higher level of semantic functionality onto the top of current Enterprise Web, enhancing usability and usefulness of resource, enabling decision support and automation. This paper aims to explore the use of Semantic Web Services in Enterprise Web and discuss the Semantic Web Services (SWS) approach for designing Enterprise Web applications. A Semantic Web Service oriented model is presented, in which resources and services are described by ontology, and processed through Semantic Web Service, allowing integrated administration, interoperability and automated reasoning

Semantic Transformation of Web Services

Web services have become the predominant paradigm for the development of distributed software systems. Web services provide the means to modularize software in a way that functionality can be described, discovered and deployed in a platform independent manner over a network (e.g., intranets, extranets and the Internet). The representation of web services by current industrial practice is predominantly syntactic in nature lacking the fundamental semantic underpinnings required to fulfill the goals of the emerging Semantic Web. This paper proposes a framework aimed at (1) modeling the semantics of syntactically defined web services through a process of interpretation, (2) scop-ing the derived concepts within domain ontologies, and (3) harmonizing the semantic web services with the domain ontologies. The framework was vali-dated through its application to web services developed for a large financial system. The worked example presented in this paper is extracted from the se-mantic modeling of these financial web services

Towards intelligent web services: the web service modeling ontology (WSMO)

The Semantic Web and the Semantic Web Services build a natural application area for Intelligent Agents, namely querying and reasoning about structured knowledge and semantic descriptions of services and their interfaces on the Web. This paper provides an overview of the Web Service Modeling Ontology, a conceptual framework for the semantical description of Web services

Integrating web services into data intensive web sites

Designing web sites is a complex task. Ad-hoc rapid prototyping easily leads to unsatisfactory results, e.g. poor maintainability and extensibility. However, existing web design frameworks focus exclusively on data presentation: the development of specific functionalities is still achieved through low-level programming. In this paper we address this issue by describing our work on the integration of (semantic) web services into a web design framework, OntoWeaver. The resulting architecture, OntoWeaver-S, supports rapid prototyping of service centred data-intensive web sites, which allow access to remote web services. In particular, OntoWeaver-S is integrated with a comprehensive web service platform, IRS-II, for the specification, discovery, and execution of web services. Moreover, it employs a set of comprehensive site ontologies to model and represent all aspects of service-centred data-intensive web sites, and thus is able to offer high level support for the design and development process