In this document the EU-project European Middleware Initiative (EMI) describes a storage accounting record (StAR), defined to reflect practical, financial and legal requirements of storage location, usage and space and data flow. The defined record might be the base for a standardized schema or an extension of an existing record like the OGF UR and this document is intended as information to be taken as input for incorporating storage resources into the OGF UR.

This document provides a set of DFDL properties that can be used as defaults for creating DFDL schema.

This document defines the mapping from DFDL 1.0 Infoset to W3C XDM, and from W3C XDM to DFDL 1.0 infoset.

Relying Party Defined Namespace Constraints (RPDNC) are limitations on the subject namespace issued by X.509 certification authorities (CAs) that are defined and enforced by the end-point at the relying party side. As grid authentication based on X.509 credentials provides the subject DN as a handle that identifies the authenticated entity, the capability to ensure subject name uniqueness is of critical importance in ensuring overall integrity of the authentication system.

This document described the rationale and use cases for relying party defined name space constraints, and lists the set of desired features a policy language expressing such constraints should have.

This document provides a complete description of the VOMS AC format, both syntax and semantics. It also describes the related extensions that must be used in a proxy certificate to make it fully VOMS-compliant.

The Production Grid Infrastructure Working Group (PGI-WG) is elaborating documents permitting to improve interoperability of Production Grids.

The purpose of this ‘Glossary of Acronyms and Terms’ is to provide an expansion of acronyms and an unambiguous definition of terms used in the context of a Production Grid.

It is based on the ‘OGSA® Glossary of terms’ GFD.120, the ‘GLUE Specification v. 2.0’ GFD.147 and the PGI ‘Vocabulary’ Wiki page.

The root terms are ‘Data processing’, ‘Administrative domain’, ‘Trust’ and ‘Federation’.

It provides a minimum background information about Grids, but does NOT attempt to justify the definitions or the context in which they may be used. The reader is referred to external documents for further explanation where necessary.

The Production Grid Infrastructure (PGI) working group works on a well-defined set of standard profiles, and additional standard specifications if needed, for job and data management that are aligned with a Grid security and information model that addresses the needs of production Grid infrastructures. These needs have been identified in various international endeavors and are in many cases based on lessons learned obtained from the numerous activities in the Grid Interoperation Now (GIN) community group. Therefore, PGI can be considered as a spin-off activity of the GIN group in order to feed back any experience of using early versions of open standards (e.g. BES, JSDL, SRM, GLUE2, UR, etc.) in Grid production setups to improve the standards wherever possible. This particular document is a survey of common use cases provided by different stakeholders of PGI profiles or standard specifications. Such stakeholders include production Grid and e-science infrastructures as well as technology providers. The goal of this document is to have a foundation for a set of important requirements to be addressed by the PGI set of profiles and/or specifications.

The topology descriptions used at Internet2 are provided in an XML format for use in the Dynamic Circuit Network suite. The topology descriptions developed by the University of Amsterdam is the Network De- scription Language.

In August and September 2009 Jeroen van der Ham worked at Internet2 on the translation of topology descriptions. This report describes some of the findings in creating this translation.

Version 1.0 of the Network Services Framework describes a framework to support the request and management of Network Services; it allows an application or network provider to request Network Services from other network providers. The framework covers the interface, protocols, agents and associated services. The Network Service Interface (NSI) is the interface between two software agents that communicate via the NSI protocol.

This document should be read in conjunction with each of the NSI Network Service informational documents and its counterpart protocol recommendation.

This document defines the detailed specifications and implementation requirements for the Inter-Domain Controller Protocol (IDCP). This document level of detail is intended to be sufficient to support independent implementation efforts.

This specification is provided to the OGF NSI Working Group as an informational document. The objective of this submission is to provide another example of a currently deployed protocol in this area, in case it is helpful to the ongoing NSI standardization efforts.

This protocol development work began as part of the DICE Control Plane Working Group. DICE is a collaboration amongst DANTE (GEANT), Internet2, CANARIE, ESnet, USLHCnet, and others. This protocol has been implemented and is currently deployed by ESnet, Internet2, GEANT AutoBAHN, USLHCnet, and others.

The IDCP defines a protocol and associated message formats that enable the dynamic provision of network resources across multiple administrative domains. The IDC architecture supports dynamic networking, the concept by which network resources (i.e. bandwidth, VLAN number, etc) are requested by end-users, automatically provisioned by software, and released when they are no longer needed. This is in contrast with the more traditional “static� networking where network configurations are manually made by network operators and usually stay in place for long periods of time.

The IDC protocol defines messages for reserving network resources, signaling resource provisioning, and gathering information about previously requested resources. These messages are defined in a SOAP web service format. This document and others relating to the IDCP are maintained at the IDCP Control Plane web site: www.controlplane.net.

Grids use X.509 certificates for authentication and authorization. These certificates are issued to subscribers that comprise a virtual organization, and are typically issued by Certification Authorities operated by real institutions. In order to ensure compliance with established policies and operational procedures, and to recommend necessary changes in controls, policies or procedures, these Certification Authorities (CAs) should be externally audited periodically. The International Grid Trust Federation (IGTF) has, based on templates established by OGF, established such sets of operational policies and procedures. This document provides an audit checklist which describes auditing items to be considered by CAs accredited by the IGTF to be compliant with the ‘Classic’ Authentication Profile, and provides the acceptable evidence for the verification of these items. Detailed processes of auditing are also described in this document which is intended as guidelines for auditing Grid CAs. Spread sheets of the check list for ‘Classic’, ‘Short Lived Credential Services (SLCS)’, and ‘Member Integrated Credential Services (MICS)’ profiles are provided as separate documents and available on the IGTF web site. This document as well as the spread sheets will be maintained and updated when there is a newer version of authentication profiles available than it refers.

This document is a result of the work of OGF RISGE-RG. It presents collection of use cases that covers various existing approaches in defining remote access interfaces to sophisticated laboratory equipment. One of the important aspect covered by these examples is an exploitation of Grid technologies for conducting and monitoring measurement tasks and experiments on complex remote scientific equipment.

The NML-WG goal is to define a schema for describing topologies of hybrid networks. This schema is in first instance intended for:
* lightpath provisioning applications to exchange topology information intra and inter domain;
* reporting performance metrics.

This document constitutes Deliverable 1 of the working group. It provides a detailed overview of the framework in which the working group operates, detailing the already existing topology schemas and providing the basis for the integration of the various projects.

Web-based online communities such as blogs, forums and scientific communities have become important places for people to seek and share expertise. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, Live etc. are not yet capable to address queries that require deep semantic understanding of the query or the document. Instead, it may be preferable to find and ask someone who has related expertise or experience on a topic. Web-based online communities are the places people often seek advice or help. Before an analysis of search capabilities for these communities can be done, we need to gather the data (questions and answers, social support or discussion, comments or advice, content rating, social relations, and so forth) that describe the communities. There is no universal standard data structure for the outline of user participation in these communities. Also, as these communities rarely interoperate, each typically only has access to its own social data and cannot benefit from other communities’ data. Extracting, aggregating and analyzing data from these communities for finding experts on a single framework is a challenging task. In this document, we present a Grid-enabled framework of expertise search (GREFES) engine, which utilizes online communities as sources for experts on various topics. We suggest an open data structure called SNML (Social Network Markup Language) to outline user participation in online communities. The architecture addresses major challenges in crawling of community data and query processing by utilizing the computational power and high bandwidth inherently available in the Grid. Our framework supports open APIs for third party providers or developers to build new solutions in order to get more user feedback to improve the system.

The Database Access and Integration Services Working Group (DAIS-WG) has submitted three specifications to the Open Grid Forum (OGF) recommendation track [WS-DAI, WS-DAIR, WS-DAIX]. These specifications define a basic set of interfaces, properties and patterns for service-based access to data. The core WS-DAI specification outlines a set of generic interfaces and properties that are common to most types of data access. These may then be extended to access specific types of data. For instance, the WS-DAIR and WS-DAIX specifications extend the base specification to provide access to relational and XML types of data respectively.

This document outlines and motivates a further extension to the WS-DAI family of specifications to provide access to RDF(S) data. This will define a standard mechanism for accessing RDF(S) data in a manner consistent with the framework defined by the WS-DAI core specification. The main outcome of this work will be two specifications that provide complementary ways for accessing RDF(S) data: by using the W3C defined SPARQL query language or through the use of ontological primitives.

This document motivates this work by presenting an overview of the role of RDF(S) in a grid context with several motivational use cases.

This document is an informal description of Use Cases and requirements for the OCCI™ Cloud API. Created by the Open Cloud Computing Interface working group. This document records the needs of Infrastructure-as-a-Service Cloud computing managers and administrators in the form of Use Cases. The Use Cases serve as the primary guide for the development of API requirements. The document is the first deliverable to demonstrate and validate the features of the Open Cloud Computing Interface.

This document describes a multi-server based namespace data management system for Resource Namespace Service (RNS), which is introduced in GFD 101. In this system, RNS can be accessed through a master node, which provides the standard interfaces and functions defined in GFD 101. When the master node receives the RNS request, it will dispatch the request to one of the slave nodes based on load balancing policy. Every slave node stores a copy of the namespace data and responses to the read request, such as list and query functions, while only one slave node responses to the write request, such as add, update and remove function. There is a data synchronization process to keep the data consistence on all the slave nodes. In this method, even though one or more slave servers failed, the RNS can also provide stable service. This multi-server based namespace data management system can improve the availability and scalability of RNS.

This document describes the various components that make up the authorization decision function of a Grid service provider. It looks at the different ways in which the various components can be combined together, and data flows between the components. This document is for informational purposes only and is not intended to form a grid standard.

This is an OGF informational document outlining the need for, and some possible approaches to developing, a Professional Grid Certification Program. It is aimed at the stakeholders who might be interested in developing such a certification programme, including potential employers of certified Grid professionals as well as the certification and training industries and middleware and technology providers.

The document outlines a possible structure of a Certification Program along with some options for how to develop and sustain such an effort. Finally, some possible future directions are outlined in the Future work section.

This document is a call to action, identifying issues and proposing a strategy in order to support and make progress in grid and e-Science education and training. Inevitably, it is neither complete nor definitive. The intention is that it will seed much greater efforts to further develop the understanding of requirements, to better characterise challenges and to propose specific strategies, curricula and collaborative efforts for international adoption. The ET-CG is already fostering other more specific work and documents that form elements of that development.

Grids in their current form of deployment and implementation have not been as successful as hoped in engendering distributed applications. Amongst other reasons, the level of detail that needs to be controlled for the successful development and deployment of applications remains too high. We argue that there is a need for higher levels of abstractions for current Grids. By introducing the relevant terminology, we try to understand Grids and Clouds as systems; we nd this leads to a natural role for the concept of Anity, and argue that this is a missing element in current Grids. Providing these anities and higher-level abstractions is consistent with the common concepts of Clouds. Thus this paper establishes how Clouds can be viewed as a logical and next higher-level abstraction from Grids.

This document describes the requirements for construction and operation of grid systems. This document does not say “Grid Systems must satisfy these requirements�. It says “These requirements shall be considered when someone designs / constructs / operates on Grid Systems�

This document describes the representation of the DRMAA 1.0 API in the Python programming language. It is based on the DRMAA 1.0 IDL recommendation (GFD-R-P.130), and maps the DRMAA IDL interface definition to specific Python language constructs.

This document describes and evaluates approaches and solutions for firewall issues, such as application level gateways, host based firewalls, VPN style gateways etc., which are currently available to solve some of the problems Grid applications may face when dealing with firewalls located between the source and the destination of their communication paths.

This document shows how specifications, that have been developed within and external to the Open Grid Forum, can be used to enable desktop access to distributed computing resources. Increasingly, Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) are developing applications that have two components – a graphical client that resides on the client and a compute intensive server compo-nent that can run on a ‘back-end’ compute cluster. Integrating these two components within net-works which frequently have firewalls and NATs, across different operating systems and software environments, provides many challenges. A standards based interface to this environment would provide ISVs with a solid foundation upon which to build their own applications.

We identify and describe a set of standards and specification that have been developed to facili-tate access to distributed computing resources. We illustrate how these specifications could en-able access to distributed computing resources through five scenarios. These range from simple job submission to a compute cluster where the client and the cluster have a common file system, to a client that stages files to and from the compute cluster while having bi-directional interaction between the application running on the compute cluster and the remote client.

By illustrating how these specifications can be applied to these scenarios we identify require-ments for both the middleware providers and the ISVs – recognizing that we are providing advice rather than rigid prescriptive solutions. Finally, we identify some open issues for discussion and feedback by the community relating to resource selection and security.

On February 28, 2008, as part of OGF22, the Open Grid Forum held Data Movement and Management Workshop. During the day-long meeting, speakers from research and industry described challenges in data movement and management and detailed some possible solutions. The goal was to look for common issues and points for collaboration among the OGF working group and with the Storage Networking Industry Association. The common theme that emerged was the challenge of metadata management. Both research centers and commercial enterprises are flooded with data and are struggling to provide useful access.

Resources in a grid need to advertise their capabilities, and activities in a grid need to consume those resources. This architecture paper defines the way to model resources’ capabilities and requirements in OGSA grids. It builds on the wealth of existing systems management information already modeled and instantiated in systems today. Examples are included.

The Open Grid Forum (OGF) has embraced the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) as the blueprint for standards-based grid computing. "Open" refers to the process used to develop standards that achieve interoperability. "Grid" is concerned with the integration, virtualization, and management of services and resources in a distributed, heterogeneous environment. It is "service-oriented" because it delivers functionality as loosely coupled, interacting services aligned with industry-accepted Web service standards. The “architecture� defines the components, their organizations and interactions, and the design philosophy used.

The purpose of this document is to provide an overview of the many interrelated recommendations and informational documents being produced by the OGSA and related working groups. Although, some documents are not OGSA specific, for example the "reference model," they have an important role within the OGSA concept and hence are explained in this document. This document also provides information regarding the intended completion dates of the documents in question, along with their dependencies on other OGSA and non-OGSA documents.