WS-PGRADE/gUSE in European Projects - Science Gateways for Distributed Computing Infrastructures - page 229

with the “ Workflows of agINFRA Integrated Services ” (Level 4). This section deals

with the orchestration of “ Workflows of data/metadata aggregators and service

providers (Level 3) on the agINFRA infrastructure that form the base of several

new integrated services/components to be accessible from user-friendly web
portals.
In the project a WS-PGRADE/gUSE-based gateway serves the two above
described stakeholder groups with special focus on supporting complex workflows
for agINFRA integrated services. As a complementary solution, in order to address
directly some end-users (researchers), a different science gateway has also been
developed by INFN ( http://aginfra-sg.ct.infn.it ) for legacy agriculture applications
based on the Catania Science Gateway Framework (Barbera 2010).

”

17.2.1 Required WS-PGRADE/gUSE features

The success of research data infrastructure initiatives depends on understanding in-
depth the needs of the intended users, therefore serious efforts were invested in this
activity to learn the most relevant technologies and directions, such as CIARD
RING. The CIARD

—

Coherence in Information for Agricultural Research for
Development initiative was launched in 2008 by (among others) the Food and
Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). CIARD aims at improving
the access to agricultural research and offers the Routemap to Information Nodes
and Gateways (RING) (Pesce 2011), where participants world-wide are able to
register their information access services, for example repositories, information
feeds, etc. Currently more than 1,000 services and more than 250 data sources are
available from almost 500 partners in the RING. The CIARD RING has been
enhanced by agINFRA partners, and become a so-called integrated service that
takes on the role of a central broker.
The targeted users and developers are heavily using the CIARD RING and they
are mostly familiar with Drupal web portal ( https://drupal.org ) interfaces. There-
fore, as the main concept; the workflow-oriented services of WS-PGRADE/gUSE
are to be accessed mostly via its Remote API from Drupal based portals to enhance
the CIARD RING provided functionalities.
Moreover, robot certi cates are crucial for this community in order to simplify

the access by the non-grid aware users. Concerning the workflow support, the
conditional branches were proven to be vital (as will be illustrated in the aggregator
workflow) when the requirements have been captured. In agINFRA, several data
management and processing components have been implemented as REST service.
The native support in WS-PGRADE/gUSE enabling the easy invocation of such
services at the job level was an important new requirement from the community,
too.