caGrid Metadata in WSRF

Globus Information Services

The Globus Information Services component, realized as the Monitoring and Discovery System (MDS) is a suite of web services to monitor and discover resources and services on Grids. This system allows users to discover what resources are considered part of a Virtual Organization (VO) and to monitor those resources. MDS services provide query and subscription interfaces to arbitrarily detailed resource data and a trigger interface that can be configured to take action when pre-configured trouble conditions are met. MDS is composed of the following three main components:

• WS MDS Index Service – This service contains a registry of grid resources and collects information from them, making it accessible and queryable from one location. Generally, a virtual organization deploys one or more index services, which then collect data on all of the grid resources available within that VO.
• WS MDS Trigger Service – This service collects data from grid resources and passes the data to appropriate programs to perform various actions in response to events. (not currently used by the caGrid metadata infrastructure).
• WS MDS Aggregator – This is the infrastructure on which the previous services are built. It collects, manages, and indexes data from an aggregator source and sends that data to an aggregator sink for processing.

WSRF Resource Properties

The section provides a brief recap of information about WSRF and the Globus implementation of it. More details can be found in the Globus documentation.

The Globus 4 toolkit provides a toolkit for create WSRF grid services. The WS-Resource Framework (WSRF) is a set of six Web services specifications that define what is termed the WS-Resource approach to modeling and managing state in a Web services context. In this approach, a resource is an entity that encapsulates the state of a stateful web service. Generally, each resource is a separate object but in certain cases it might be a singleton. A resource may just be a front end for state kept in an external entity, such as a file in a file system, a row in a database or an entity bean in a J2EE container.

A resource key is represented by a ResourceKey interface. It is a combination of a key name and the actual key value. A resource is represented by a Resource interface. It is a marker interface without any method defined. All resource objects must implement this interface. Resources are managed by an object that implements the ResourceHome interface. The ResourceHome interface provides methods for finding and removing resources as well as methods for identifying the SOAP header element and class for the resource key. In addition to the methods specified by the interface, ResourceHome implementations will generally provide an implementation-specific create() call or any other methods that operate on a set of resources.

Resources may have resource properties. Resource properties are declared in the WSDL of the service as elements of a resource property document. The ResourceProperties interface contains a single accessor method for retrieving the ResourcePropertySet from a resource. It must be implemented by all resources that want to expose resource properties. The ResourcePropertySet is the representation of the resource property document associated with the resource. It contains methods for managing the set of resource properties, e.g. adding and removing resource properties, and for discovering properties of the document itself, e.g. its name. The ResourceProperty interface needs to be implemented by all resource properties. It contains methods for: managing the set of values associated with the resource property, discovering properties of the resource property element, and serializing the resource property to a array of SOAP or DOM elements. The ResourcePropertyMetaData interface contains metadata information about a ResourceProperty such as resource property name, cardinality, etc.

Once metadata items are exposed as ResourceProperties, they can be queried using standard web service operations defined by the WS-ResourceProperties specification. Consult the specification for more details, but a synopsis of the operations are provided here:

• GetResourceProperty: allows access to the value of any resource property given its QName.
• GetMultipleResourceProperties: allows access to the value of several resource properties at once, given each of their Qnames.
• QueryResourceProperties: allows complex queries on the resource properties document. Currently, the query language used is XPath.