Science Gateways for Semantic-Web-Based Life Science Applications
by Roberto Barbera (University of Catania and INFN, Italy)
followed by a panel discussion "Data modelling and analysis for the masses with cloud-enabled science gateways?"
The colloquium is part of the programme of HealthGrid/IWSG-Life.
Panelists:
Roberto Barbera, University of Catania and INFN, Italy
Shantenu Jha, Rutgers State University of New Jersey, US
Péter Kacsuk, MTA-SZTAKI, Budapest, Hungary
Tony Solomonides, NorthShore University Health System, US
Henri Vrooman, Erasmus MC - University Medical Center Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Nancy Wilkins-Diehr, San Diego Supercomputer Center, University of California, San Diego, CA USA
Abstract
e-Infrastructures have been built in several areas of the world but, despite the investments made by the European Commission and by other funding agencies, both at national and international level, the total number of its users is in the order of magnitude of 104, much less than O(107), which is the order of magnitude of the number of GÉANT users, or even O(106), which is the is the order of magnitude of the number of researchers in Europe. The reasons for this, investigated by several surveys (e.g., the EU-commissioned eResearch2020 one), are related to the complexity for non-IT-expert users of the Grid security, the little adoption of standards to let different middleware be interoperable among each other, and the lack of general frameworks to build easily customizable high-level user interfaces.
In this keynote speech, I will report on the work done at INFN, in the context of several EU projects, to develop a standard-based and middleware-independent framework to build new-generation Science Gateways supporting Identity Federations.
Prof. Roberto Barbera was born in Catania (Italy) in October 1963. He graduated in Physics "cum laude" at the University of Catania in 1986 and since 1990 he holds a Ph.D. in Physics from the same University. Since 2005 he is Associate Professor at the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the Catania University. Since his graduation his main research activity has been done in the domains of Experimental Nuclear and Particle Physics. He has been involved in many experiments in France, Russia, United States and Sweden to study nuclear matter properties in heavy ion collisions at intermediate energies. He is author of several book chapters, more than 170 scientific papers published on international journals, and more than 400 proceedings of international conferences. He is editor of the International Journal of Distributed Systems and Technologies and referee of Journal of Grid Computing, Future Generation Computer Systems, and BMC Medical Informatics.
Since 1997 he has been involved in CERN experiments and he is currently one of the members of the ALICE Experiment at LHC. Within ALICE, he has been the coordinator of the Off-line software of the Inner Tracking System detector and member of the Off-line Board. Since late 1999 he is interested in Grid Computing. He is member of the Executive Board of the Italian INFN Grid Project, of the Executive Committee of the Italian Grid Infrastructure (the Italian National Grid Initiative) and of the Scientific & Technical Committee of GARR (the Italian National Research and Education Network). Between 2005 and 2009 he has been the Director of two large Grid Projects (TriGrid VL and PI2S2) funded by the Sicilian Regional Government and by the Ministry of University and Research, respectively. At European level, he has been involved with managerial duties in many EU funded projects and he is currently the Coordinator of the EPIKH Marie Curie Action. In 2004, he created the international GILDA Grid infrastructure for training and dissemination that he coordinates since the beginning. He is currently involved in the design and implementation of Science Gateways for various Virtual Research Communities.
This colloquium was organized by e-BioGrid.