ASTROGRID-2 : Lifetime Plan

May 2005

Part-E : Work Areas

The project recognises several broad areas for planning work. These are not "workpackages" in the traditional sense, as they do not have fixed deliverables or resource allocation - deliverables are fixed for each Cycle Plan, and workgroups assigned at that time.

The original proposal had seven work areas : W1 = management and co-ordination ; W2 = new software infrastructure; W3 = research and prototyping; W4 = standards development; W5 = public outreach; W6 = uptake and physical grid; and W7 = data centre support. These have been revised, partly because some activities were not funded, and partly to optimise the match with the areas within the FP6 funded VOTECH design study. The new work areas are as follows. The first few match explicitly onto a corresponding VOTECH DS area.

A1 = DS1 : Programme Management. This provides top level policy development amongst the AGLI, overall project planning by the management team, co-ordination with external e-science colleagues and the IVOA, financial planning and decision making, and establishing an external presence through web pages, workshops, and so on.

A2 = DS2 : Scientific and Technical Management This provides leadership and technical integration for the project and is responsible for all external technical deliverables. It is responsible for common processes and standards, the software repository, versioned software releases etc, cand collaboration mechanisms such as Forum, Wiki, Maven, and CVS. Detailed plans are evolved each cycle, and the work of developers and scientists planned and monitored by the Project Scientist and Project Manager.

A3 = DS3 : Infrastructure development. This is the core of AstroGrid work. It is responsible for delivering fully engineered working software components that can be used in deployed systems. This includes the AstroGrid user interface such as the portal and the workbench. It also includes documenting and releasing the software suite so that other projects worldwide can use it. Much of the basic infrastructure is in place, but new components are envisaged, and much will need replacing and refreshing. Requirements for new and refreshed components will emerge from the R&D work areas below.

A4 = DS4 : New User Tools. We expect most tools development to happen outside AstroGrid. However, some PPARC funded AstroGrid-2 effort will be matched with the VOTECH funded resource to develop new user tools that work with the infrastructure. (Note that developing general methods for easily integrating third party applications is seen as part of A3, infrastructure development).

A5 = DS5 : Intelligent Resource Discovery. This work area aims at studying and assessing new technologies that will increase the power of resource discovery - e.g. ontology, the semantic web, intelligent agents. The work includes design studies and prototype implementations before proposing a new component for A3.

A6 = DS6 Data Exploration. This work area aims at studying a range of datamining and visualisation algorithms and packages, with a view to assessing how they can be run as distributed services, how they can be made AstroGrid-compliant, and how they can be extended to extremely large datasets. The intention is to deploy specific examples of such packages, but also to develop a generic "AstroGrid Data Exploration Framework (ADEF)".

A7 : Standards programme. Development of standards is at the core of the whole VO enterprise. This work area sets aside effort for contribution to IVOA workgroups. AstroGrid intends to be pro-active in leading several areas of international standards work.

A8 : Deployment The aim is to deploy AstroGrid software at UK data centres, publishing key datasets within the framework, and releasing successive versions of a working system for actually doing science. This cannot be done by the project alone, requiring us to work with colleagues at UK data centres. The combination of core AstroGrid staff and the key individuals at the data centres is referred to as the "Greater AstroGrid"

-- AndyLawrence - 02 May 2005