=============
About Ecogrid
=============

The goal of developing Ecogrid is to provide a uniform grid environment for
heterogeneous data management systems used in SEEK project to address various 
issues in building a grid system for ecology and other science domains such 
as distributed data management, distributed data access, distributed security 
management and distributed workflow management. 

There are four data management systems being used by SEEK project. They are:

  SRB (UCSD, http://www.npaci.edu/dice/srb)
  Metacat (UCSB, http://knb.ecoinformatics.org/software/metacat/metacattour.html)
  DiGIR (KU, http://www.specifysoftware.org/Informatics/informaticsdigir)
  Xanthoria (ASU, )

For details of each data management system, please check out its document
in the directory, 'docs', in this ecogrid client package.

Using OGSA technology (www.globus.org), Ecogrid developers have identified  
four grid services within Ecogrid. These services are:

  1. Query Service
  2. Authentication service
  3. Put Service
  4. Registry Service

The Ecogrid Query service allows users to download data or submit queries to 
Ecogrid and retrieve query results. There are two operations, query and get, 
in Ecogrid Query service.  The GWSDL for query service can be found in the 
following link.
http://cvs.ecoinformatics.org/cvs/cvsweb.cgi/seek/projects/ecogrid/src/xsd/EcoGridQueryInterfaceLevelOne.gwsdl
Other XML schema for query services: query.xsd and resultset.xsd 
(they can be found in http://cvs.ecoinformatics.org/cvs/cvsweb.cgi/seek/projects/ecogrid/src/xsd.)

The Ecogrid Authentication service has two operations, 'login' and 'logout'. The login 
operation authenticates a user and issues a session ID, which can be used for 
other ecogrid operations such as data uploading. The logout operation is used
to terminate the session ID.

GWSDL for Ecogrid Authentication service: 
http://cvs.ecoinformatics.org/cvs/cvsweb.cgi/seek/projects/ecogrid/src/xsd/EcoGridAuthInterfaceLevelOne.gwsdl

The Put service enable users to upload files, to upload xml documents or to add 
metadata. In SRB, uploading data means upload a file into SRB repository and uploading
metadata means adding metadata for an existing file in SRB. In Metacat, uploading
data will upload the content of a file as a data object in Metacat repository. And
uploading metadata means to create a new xml document including eml document.

GWSDL for Ecogrid Put service:
http://cvs.ecoinformatics.org/cvs/cvsweb.cgi/seek/projects/ecogrid/src/xsd/EcoGridPutInterfaceLevelOne.gwsdl

Ecogrid registry service provides users an easy access to ecogrid service repository.
Users can easily insert a new service entry if they want to publish their service.
And user can query the registry repository via query operation from registry service 
to find a service and its location.

GWSDL for Ecogrid registry service:
http://cvs.ecoinformatics.org/cvs/cvsweb.cgi/seek/projects/ecogrid/src/xsd_reg/EcoRegInterfaceLevelOne.gwsdl

=========
GSHs
========
SRB:
   http://orion.sdsc.edu:8080/ogsa/services/org/ecoinformatics/ecogrid/QueryServiceLevelOne 
   http://orion.sdsc.edu:8080/ogsa/services/org/ecoinformatics/ecogrid/PutServiceLevelOne 

Metacat:
  http://pine.nceas.ucsb.edu:8090/ogsa/services/org/ecoinformatics/ecogrid/EcoGridQueryInterfaceLevelOneService
  http://pine.nceas.ucsb.edu:8090/ogsa/services/org/ecoinformatics/ecogrid/EcoGridLevelOneAuthenticationService
  http://pine.nceas.ucsb.edu:8090/ogsa/services/org/ecoinformatics/ecogrid/EcoGridLevelOnePutService

DiGIR:
  http://129.237.127.19:8080/ogsa/services/org/ecoinformatics/ecogrid/EcoGridQueryInterfaceLevelOneService

Note: Users can view a list of available OGSA services using following links.
        http://orion.sdsc.edu:8080/ogsa/services
        http://pine.nceas.ucsb.edu:8090/ogsa/services
        http://129.237.127.19:8080/ogsa/services


=========
Glossary
=========
Grid Service Handles (GSH): an identifier for an OGSA client to locate a service.
GWSDL: Grid Web Service Description Language, an extension of WSDL for building grid services.