Bartosz Kryza

Grid organizational memory-provision of a high-level Grid abstraction layer supported by ontology alignment

In this paper the problem of managing ontological descriptions for a dynamically-changing Grid environment is addressed. The focus of the research is on unification of semantic descriptions for Grid services and resources through ontologies. The Grid Organizational Memory (GOM) has been designed and implemented to enable storing and accessing Grid metadata, kept in the form of ontologies. In GOM, ontology storage and management are designed to support the natural evolution process both in the knowledge structure and knowledge management services. An important element of the GOM framework is the ontology separation schema, specifying the internal vertical and horizontal dependencies according to the Virtual Organization thematic domains, efficiency of knowledge retrieval and ontology development support. The separation schema is applied in the knowledge base distribution model on the Grid. An ontology alignment-based approach is proposed to minimize user commitment on the Grid ontological metadata, to support ontology usage and development. In particular the ontology similarity based approach is presented as support for ontology updates, e.g. extension with new facts from external ontologies and environments, as well as a more efficient and complete, less implementation-bounded querying process. This paper presents research on semantic description of the Grid environment within the scope of the K-Wf Grid project that addresses knowledge-based semiautomatic workflow construction for applications on the Grid.

Translation of Common Information Model to Web Ontology Language

This paper presents a brief overview of the work on translation of Common Information Model (CIM) to Web Ontology Language (OWL) standard. The main motivation for the work is given, along with discussion of major issues faced during this work. The paper contains also comparison of existing approaches to conversion of CIM to OWL and presents the CIM2OWL tool that performs the conversion of CIM schema and allows convertion of CIM instances - representing for instance configurations of particular systems - to OWL individuals.

Dynamic VO Establishment in Distributed Heterogeneous Business Environments

As modern SOA and Grid infrastructures are being moved from academic and research environments to more challenging business and commercial applications, such issue as control of resource sharing become of crucial importance. In order to manage and share resources within distributed environments the idea of Virtual Organizations (VO) emerged, which enables sharing only subsets of resources among partners of such a VO within potentially larger settings. This paper describes the Framework for Intelligent Virtual Organizations (FiVO), focusing on its functionality of enforcing security (Authentication and Authorization) in dynamically deployed Virtual Organizations. The paper presents the overall architecture of the framework along with different security settings which FiVO can support within one Virtual Organization.

Formal Model for Contract Negotiation in Knowledge-Based Virtual Organizations

In this paper we propose a formal model which supports the process of setting up a Virtual Organization by means of allowing contract negotiation between parties pariticipating in such VO. The negotiated contract is used to configure the necessary Grid middleware components for the purpose of contract enforcement during the lifetime of the Virtual Organization. We present a brief overview of the framework and discuss in detail the formal model underlying the process of contract negotiation and how the ontological description of the domains related to given VO supports this process.

INTERACTIVE CLOUD DATA FARMING ENVIRONMENT FOR MILITARY MISSION PLANNING SUPPORT

In a modern globalised world, military and peace keeping forces often face situations which require very subtle and well planned operations taking into account cultural and social aspects of a given region and its population as well as dynamic psychological awareness related to recent events which can have impact on the attitude of the civilians. The goal of the EUSAS project is to develop a prototype of a system enabling mission planning support and training capabilities for soldiers and police forces dealing with asymmetric threat situations, such as crowd control in urban territory. In this paper, we discuss the data-farming infrastructure developed for this project, allowing generation of large amount of data from agent based simulations for further analysis allowing soldier training and evaluation of possible outcomes of different rules of engagement.

Towards a security-enhanced PaaS platform for multi-cloud applications

Abstract Multi-cloud adaptive application provisioning can solve the vendor lock-in problem and allows optimising user requirements by selecting the best from the multitude of services offered by different cloud providers. To this end, such provisioning type is increasingly supported by new or existing research prototypes and platforms. One major concern, actually preventing users from moving to the cloud, comes with respect to security, which becomes more complex in multi-cloud settings. Such a concern spans two main aspects: (a) suitable access control on user personal data, VMs and platform services and (b) planning and adapting application deployments based on security requirements. As such, this paper addresses both security aspects by proposing a novel model-driven approach and architecture which secures multi-cloud platforms, enables users to have their own private space and guarantees that application deployments are not only constructed based on but can also maintain a certain user-required security level. Such a solution exploits state-of-the-art security standards, security software and secure model management technology. Moreover, it covers different access control scenarios involving external, web-based and programmatic user authentication.

A TOOLKIT FOR STORAGE QOS PROVISIONING FOR DATA-INTENSIVE APPLICATIONS

This paper describes a programming toolkit developed in the PL-Grid project, named QStorMan, which supports storage QoS provisioning for data-intensive applications in distributed environments. QStorMan exploits knowledge-oriented methods for matching storage resources to non-functional requirements, which are defined for a data-intensive application. In order to support various usage scenarios, QStorMan provides two interfaces, such as programming libraries or a web portal. The interfaces allow to define the requirements either directly in an application source code or by using an intuitive graphical interface. The first way provides finer granularity, e.g., each portion of data processed by an application can define a different set of requirements. The second method is aimed at legacy applications support, which source code can not be modified. The toolkit has been evaluated using synthetic benchmarks and the production infrastructure of PL-Grid, in particular its storage infrastructure, which utilizes the Lustre file system.

Grid Organizational Memory: A Versatile Solution for Ontology Management in the Grid

Recent developments in the field of Grid computing reveal the strong need of managing metadata on much higher level than it used to be done previously. Standard solutions like MDS provide relatively efficient means of managing Grid resources on a low level basis, usually available for Grid experts and simple search tools. However in order to manage resources among multiple Virtual Organizations composed of highly heterogeneous entities, joining and leaving the Grid in a dynamic manner, a more flexible way of describing and managing their resources is required. In this paper, a solution to this problem based on ontologies and distributed knowledge base is presented. The knowledge base distributed architecture is discussed with the flexibility and fault-tolerance outlined. The performance evaluation for typical use cases shows, that ontology separation and various configurations of GOM make it useful for managing knowledge in multiple domains.

Monitoring of SLA parameters within VO for the SOA paradigm

Current trends in modern scientific and business IT infrastructures pose certain requirements in the middleware layer in order to maximize the automation of all life-cycle phases of such infrastructures including inception, deployment, execution, and dissolution. In case this infrastructure is composed of resources of different organizations, for instance in form of a Virtual Organization, the management of these resources is especially needed for achieving new quality in business. In this paper we deal with a specific aspect of the IT infrastructure management related to autonomous enforcement of Service Level Agreement between organizations sharing their resources within a Virtual Organization. The presented framework utilizes semantic technologies in order to virtualize the heterogeneity of underlying middleware components and to allow integration of services between these organizations.

Distributed Contract Negotiation System for Virtual Organizations

Nowadays, with the broadening usage of distributed systems and Grid, the need for cooperation between many different heterogeneous organizations occurs. Such cooperation usually requires sharing of access to data, service and other tangible or intangible resources. To accomplish such cooperative efforts between organizations, an idea of the Virtual Organization (VO) emerged. It allows the organizations to share resources between the partners, while enforcing proper quality of service and security. In order to enable creation of such Virtual Organization, it is necessary to allow the participants of the VO to negotiation an agreement concerning the rules of cooperation, which will be encoded in a machine processable format. In this paper we present the application of the ESB integration architecture in the specialized distributed contract negotiation service - the FiVO DCNS, which is responsible for distributing contract negotiation events and queries between components of FiVO deployed in different organizations.