Project Timeline
Phase 1: Requirements Analysis and System Design (months 1-2).
This will involve:
- An analysis of requirements for both providers and consumers across the five NANO nodes;
- An analysis of existing hardware, software, storage infrastructure and legacy systems and databases in each of the nodes;
- Review of existing relevant international standards, technologies and projects;
- Development of a common approach to satisfy the wide variety of requirements, disciplines and legacy systems of NANO;
- Metadata schema design (based on the Open Microscopy Environment standard (OME) plus discipline-specific schemas and ontologies);
- Architectural system design - this will be based on existing Grid, metadata and security standards and technologies and open source software solutions e.g., Globus toolkit, SRB, Metacatalog server and the WS-Resource Framework, OWL and Shibboleth). But will involve extending these technologies where necessary to provide richer metadata and semantic descriptions for future knowledge mining;
Phase 2: Implementation (months 3-10).
This will involve:
- Development of tools to enable the capture, description, storage, retrieval and analysis of scientific images and data across the nodes;
- Development of federated identity and access management tools - user login, authentication and authorization (using Shibboleth and eduPerson);
- Development of a prototype system operating between the NANO nodes at UQ and Uni. of Sydney;
- Integration of the system components - login, instrument booking system, image/data capture and storage, metadata generation, image analysis services etc.
- Construction of a testbed database of scientific images and data distributed between UQ and Uni.Sydney;
- User-friendly, intuitive graphical user interface design;
- Development of web portal with common booking system and advanced search, browse, query and presentation functionality with simple access constraints.
Phase 3:System evaluation, feedback and refinement (months 11-12).
This will involve:
- Evaluation of the testbed system through user trials by NANO scientists
- Integration and evaluation of collaborative image annotation tools (Vannotea);
- Refinement of system components based on user feedback and the results of the evaluation trials.
Phase 4 (months 12-13) - Final report and post-funding workshop.