FY00: Object Web Technologies for Education and Computing Portals

NPAC's activities fit well into the Alliance road map and in our 98 activities, we built
a prototype computing portal for nanomaterials illustrating some of the features
highlighted in the common portal architecture (CPA) and consistent with grid
architecture roadmap. We also developed a prototype portal collaboration service.

Computing Portal Architecture (CPA)
In our activity in FY00, we propose to work within the emerging Alliance CPA in the
areas of basic architecture, secure object brokers, visual authoring tools built around
our WebFlow technology, modifying our current system to support Alliance standards. We
will do this both for the initial AT team chosen by the Alliance -  chemical
engineering. We hope to do this by abstracting our work (as seen say in DoD Gateway in
its most modern form) as services which can be integrated with the technologies and
integration work of AT team, Indiana and Argonne. 
We anticipate a substantial Alliance planning activity in all aspects of portal
development and we will participate in most areas as we have quite a bit of relevant
experience. In particular we will continue leadership of Java Grande activity and its
Computing Portal working group http://www.computingportals.org.
Another major activity identified at Oak Brook in May 99 concerns XML standards for
scientific data where a working group was proposed. This needs to set standards and also
either develop or recommend existing XML management tools. We have already work of this
type with NASA and DoD and will participate in these discussions when they are started.

Portal Collaboration and Visualization Services
Collaboration is both a key part of the access grid and a major service identified
in the Alliance portal architecture. We will work with the Alliance to develop a
good definition of collaboration for portals viewing collaboration as implying a
general asynchronous or synchronous shared object facility. This will be
integrated with the portal architecture design as collaboration is just one
of the properties of portal components. A powerful event service seems the key
enabling infrastructure for a flexible robust system.
We will study the area of collaborative visualization -- using our simple system
SV2 as a testbed -- with the idea of defining this as a portal service compatible
with the overall ideas described above.