Hi All,
I have heard a number of people complaining this week, at GGF, that "Information is a hole". It was also on the slides shown by Dave Snelling on Thursday morning.
Hmm, I think that the total "number of people complaining" was me, Dr. Maciel, Frederico, and Mr. Buchholz. (Read the signature in the end of this e-mail or else you won't get the joke :-). I have used the strong expression "black hole" to say that the information services part of OGSA is very important, concrete work on it is more and more needed, but there is nobody working on it. I was not complaining (sorry if I sent the wrong nuance), but I've been quite vocal about it since the lack of work on this important area of OGSA is making me uneasy.
From Hiro:
We believe we do not underestimate role and importance of INFOD. However, from our OGSA architecture point of view, information service should also cover higher level services, e.g. discovery, directory, and registory which will use INFOD for their transport means.
Yes, all this with a *lot* of scalability -- think 10 thousand nodes. I remember Abdeslem saying that there are a number of existing systems and a lot of experience on this area, and the OGSA-WG needs somebody to bring us this experience. (I have tried to follow the INFOD work, but clashes in GGF sessions and lack of bandwidth have prevented me from doing it.)
We are more than happy to talk with INFOD folks on how to fit your work in OGSA architecture. We would very much appreciate if you or your colleage could take care of these higher level information services in addtion to INFOD?
Ditto. Regards, Dr. Frederico Buchholz Maciel Hitachi America R&D