19th International CODATA Conference
Category: Interoperability

Services-based Data Access and Integration Middleware for Scientific Database

Deting Yang (ydt@cnic.ac.cn) and Kai Nan (nankai@cnic.ac.cn)
Computer Network Information Center,  The Chinese Academy of Sciences, China

The importance of data access and integration is growing rapidly in the development of Scientific Database (SDB), which is a long-term project of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) since 1980s. Fields as diverse as bioinformatics, geophysics, astronomy, medicine, meteorology and particle physics are facing an exponentially increasing volume of available data. A prime challenge for Scientific Database is to enable the effective access, integration, analysis and presentation from the distributed and heterogeneous scientific data, so that the scientists can exploit its potential. Data grid is a vehicle for achieving this. According to our experiences in Scientific Database, this paper firstly summarizes the characteristics of scientific data resources, and investigates the key requirements for the middleware to enable uniform access and sharing for multi-discipline data resources. Furthermore, this paper introduces an architecture built upon Open Grid Service Architecture (OGSA) to facilitate accessing data resources and constructing truly distributed, scalable, loosely-coupled application. Some implementations are given in the last section.