Upload
katherine-strickland
View
218
Download
1
Tags:
Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
STARIntelligent Agents and Web Services
Alasdair AllanTim Naylor University of Exeter
Iain SteeleDave CarterJason EthertonChris Mottram Liverpool John Moores University
Themis Bowcock University of Liverpool
Imagine a system which...
Has unified access to archived data & catalogues,
and to bibliographic data,
and to telescopes,
and has intelligent software agents to handle the results.
IVOA Interoperability Meeting May 12-16 2003 STAR
The eSTAR Project
Initally funded by the Department of Trade and Industryas an e-Science Demonstrator Project.
Prototype robotic telescope network was developed to test the computing infrastructure which could be used for larger scale projects. This worked!
Now working on those projects:
Resource brokering for observational facilities Middleware implications of Intelligent Agents (IAs) Deployment on research class telescopes
IVOA Interoperability Meeting May 12-16 2003 STAR
Unique Ideas
Two fundamental ideas behind the project which makesit unique.
Treat telescopes and databases in a similar manner, both being made available on the Observational Grid.
The main user of the Grid should not be humans, but Intelligent Agents making observation requests.
IVOA Interoperability Meeting May 12-16 2003 STAR
The Observational Grid
Multi-agent system using the contract model.
No overall supervisor, which gives scalability. IA's submitrequests to nodes on the network, not commands.
IA's also do datamining from databases such as SIMBADand ADS, catalogues such as the USNO-A2, and surveyssuch as the DSS.
Databases are only special cases of telescopes, thatcan return data instantly, no other difference.
IVOA Interoperability Meeting May 12-16 2003 STAR
The Grid
Overall Architecture
STARIVOA Interoperability Meeting May 12-16 2003
Telescope + Pipeline
Bibliographic Database
Object Database
Intelligent Agents
Surveys + Catalogues
The Intelligent Agent (IA)
Can view the system as a unified information grid, withinwhich intelligent agents live.
IA's are developed by astronomers to address their ownscience drivers, the agents can request and interpret data.
Scalable, multiple agents can talk to multiple nodes.
eSTAR is the only group applying the emerging agenttechnologies to astrophysics.
STARIVOA Interoperability Meeting May 12-16 2003
eSTAR Prototype
IVOA Interoperability Meeting May 12-16 2003 STAR
eSTAR Next Generation
In collaboration with Tim Jenness, Frossie Economouand Nial Tanvir we intend to deploy the eSTAR systemonto UKIRT and the JCMT within the next couple ofmonths to perform automated - Ray Burst followup
Reacts to - Ray alert from IBAS via TCP socket Carries out JHK photometry ORAC-DR reduces data, returns data products Agent analyses products, cross-correlates with with existing online catalogue and identifies burster Carries out followup spectroscopy Carries out JHK photometry Agent cross correlates with previous photometry and orders further followup spectroscopy if needed
STARIVOA Interoperability Meeting May 12-16 2003
Other Telescopes...
The eSTAR system will also be deployed onto theLiverpool Telescope and the two Faulkes Telescopesover the next two years.
In addition, discussions are ongoing with members of the Citadel ASTRA Project about deploying onto the ASTRA Spectrophotometric Telescope.
Preliminary discussions with ESO indicate that interfacingthe system with P2PP shouldn't pose significant problems.
STARIVOA Interoperability Meeting May 12-16 2003
IA Architecture
STARIVOA Interoperability Meeting May 12-16 2003
Multi-agent Collaborative Model
eSTAR Next Generation
IVOA Interoperability Meeting May 12-16 2003 STAR
What has this to do with Web Services?
Intelligent Agents are both providers and consumersof web and grid services.
Consumers e.g. name resolution, catalogues and databases, biblographic services, surveys
Importance of meta-data can not be over stressed.
Providers e.g. access to telescopes, “agents as processes”
STARIVOA Interoperability Meeting May 12-16 2003
Agents as Providers of Services
We provide a standardised infrastructure to allow access telescopes over web services using SOAP and RTML.
RTML is “Robotic Telescope Markup Language” andis an XML dialect meant to enable the transparent useof remote telescopes.
Originally developed by Rick Hessman for the Berkeley'sHands-On Universe Project. Other groups, such as eSTAR,have made additions and contributed to the developmentof the standard.
See http://sunra.lbl.gov/rtml/ for information about RTML.
STARIVOA Interoperability Meeting May 12-16 2003
But Agents can also provide...
Agents can also provide services, independent of telescopes, as providers of “processes” resulting inscience data products.
Agents are about decision making...
These products would normally be part of the agent decision making process, but can be viewed as end results in themselves, and served via web and grid services by the agent to external queries.
e.g. The Burster Agent provides a filtered and annotated list of - Ray bursts, and URI's of associated resources, such as SPI ACS lightcurves.
STARIVOA Interoperability Meeting May 12-16 2003
What Sort of Science Products?
Other science products that can be produced by eSTAR's agents include,
Colour-magnitude diagrams
Lightcurves, trailed spectrograms
Periodograms (e.g. FT, or 2 periodogram)
Can be provided transparently to the user as the agenthas knowledge of both resources available on the Gridand processes to create these products.
STARIVOA Interoperability Meeting May 12-16 2003
Middleware Implications of Agents
PPARC funded e-Science Studentship
Investigating the implications of agent technology to the Virtual Observatory (VO).
Intelligent Agents for data mining and generic data grids tasks.
Mobile agents and their implications for database queries.
Agents as the applications layer for Grids?
STARIVOA Interoperability Meeting May 12-16 2003
Where now?
Next six months:
Deploy eSTAR onto UKIRT and JCMT Support and improve existing small telescope network Apply for more money!
Next couple of years:
Deploy eSTAR onto the LT and Faulkes telescopes Deploy eSTAR onto ASTRA telescope (and others?) Apply agent technologies to data grids Develop observational brokering services
STARIVOA Interoperability Meeting May 12-16 2003
Summary
It is important that federated databases and telescopesshare a common interface, there is no fundamentaldifference between them other than the time it takesto return the data and the date stamp.
We believe that power users of the grid will use intelligentagents technology and not dumb applications.
See our website http://www.estar.org.uk/ for more details about the project. Some links to recent papers abouteSTAR can be found on my IVOA Wiki Users Page.
STARIVOA Interoperability Meeting May 12-16 2003