Jetendr Shamdasani

Jetendr Shamdasani, Andrew Branson, Richard McClatchey et al.

This paper presents the CRISTAL-iSE project as a framework for the management of provenance information in industry. The project itself is a research collaboration between academia and industry. A key factor in the project is the use of a system known as CRISTAL which is a mature system based on proven description driven principles. A crucial element in the description driven approach is that the fact that objects (Items) are described at runtime enabling managed systems to be both dynamic and flexible. Another factor is the notion that all Items in CRISTAL are stored and versioned, therefore enabling a provenance collection system. In this paper a concrete application, called Agilium, is briefly described and a future application CIMAG-RA is presented which will harness the power of both CRISTAL and Agilium.

Jetendr Shamdasani, Andrew Branson, Richard McClatchey

This paper discusses the CRISTAL object lifecycle management system and its use in provenance data management and the traceability of system events. This software was initially used to capture the construction and calibration of the CMS ECAL detector at CERN for later use by physicists in their data analysis. Some further uses of CRISTAL in different projects (CMS, neuGRID and N4U) are presented as examples of its flexible data model. From these examples, applications are drawn for the High Energy Physics domain and some initial ideas for its use in data preservation HEP are outlined in detail in this paper. Currently investigations are underway to gauge the feasibility of using the N4U Analysis Service or a derivative of it to address the requirements of data and analysis logging and provenance capture within the HEP long term data analysis environment.

Andrew Branson, Jetendr Shamdasani, Richard McClatchey

Evolving user requirements presents a considerable software engineering challenge, all the more so in an environment where data will be stored for a very long time, and must remain usable as the system specification evolves around it. Capturing the description of the system addresses this issue since a description-driven approach enables new versions of data structures and processes to be created alongside the old, thereby providing a history of changes to the underlying data models and enabling the capture of provenance data. This description-driven approach is advocated in this paper in which a system called CRISTAL is presented. CRISTAL is based on description-driven principles; it can use previous versions of stored descriptions to define various versions of data which can be stored in various forms. To demonstrate the efficacy of this approach the history of the project at CERN is presented where CRISTAL was used to track data and process definitions and their associated provenance data in the construction of the CMS ECAL detector, how it was applied to handle analysis tracking and data index provenance in the neuGRID and N4U projects, and how it will be matured further in the CRISTAL-ISE project. We believe that the CRISTAL approach could be invaluable in handling the evolution, indexing and tracking of large datasets, and are keen to apply it further in this direction.

Richard McClatchey, Andrew Branson, Jetendr Shamdasani

In the age of the Cloud and so-called Big Data systems must be increasingly flexible, reconfigurable and adaptable to change in addition to being developed rapidly. As a consequence, designing systems to cater for evolution is becoming critical to their success. To be able to cope with change, systems must have the capability of reuse and the ability to adapt as and when necessary to changes in requirements. Allowing systems to be self-describing is one way to facilitate this. To address the issues of reuse in designing evolvable systems, this paper proposes a so-called description-driven approach to systems design. This approach enables new versions of data structures and processes to be created alongside the old, thereby providing a history of changes to the underlying data models and enabling the capture of provenance data. The efficacy of the description-driven approach is exemplified by the CRISTAL project. CRISTAL is based on description-driven design principles; it uses versions of stored descriptions to define various versions of data which can be stored in diverse forms. This paper discusses the need for capturing holistic system description when modelling large-scale distributed systems.

Kamran Munir, Saad Liaquat Kiani, Khawar Hasham et al.

Recent developments in data management and imaging technologies have significantly affected diagnostic and extrapolative research in the understanding of neurodegenerative diseases. However, the impact of these new technologies is largely dependent on the speed and reliability with which the medical data can be visualised, analysed and interpreted. The EUs neuGRID for Users (N4U) is a follow-on project to neuGRID, which aims to provide an integrated environment to carry out computational neuroscience experiments. This paper reports on the design and development of the N4U Analysis Base and related Information Services, which addresses existing research and practical challenges by offering an integrated medical data analysis environment with the necessary building blocks for neuroscientists to optimally exploit neuroscience workflows, large image datasets and algorithms in order to conduct analyses. The N4U Analysis Base enables such analyses by indexing and interlinking the neuroimaging and clinical study datasets stored on the N4U Grid infrastructure, algorithms and scientific workflow definitions along with their associated provenance information.

Andrew Branson, Richard McClatchey, Jean-Marie Le Goff et al.

Software engineers frequently face the challenge of developing systems whose requirements are likely to change in order to adapt to organizational reconfigurations or other external pressures. Evolving requirements present difficulties, especially in environments in which business agility demands shorter development times and responsive prototyping. This paper uses a study from CERN in Geneva to address these research questions by employing a description-driven approach that is responsive to changes in user requirements and that facilitates dynamic system reconfiguration. The study describes how handling descriptions of objects in practice alongside their instances (making the objects self-describing) can mediate the effects of evolving user requirements on system development. This paper reports on and draws lessons from the practical use of a description-driven system over time. It also identifies lessons that can be learned from adopting such a self-describing description-driven approach in future software development.