The Sci-GaIA project and introduction to the hackfest

• Roberto Barbera (University of Catania - Italy)

Room: Department of Computer Science This lecture presents the Sci-GaIA project and introduces the WACREN e-Research Hackfest.

Patterns in e-Science Applications

• Bruce Becker (CSIR - South Africa)

Room: Department of Computer Science The hackfest brings together researchers and infrastructure service developers, in order to bring new applications to bear in scientific research. But what resources will be available to deploy these applications on in a production environment ? And what aspects of applications make for good practice, and for bad practice ? Using Design Patterns as an analogy, we investigate patterns in grid and cloud infrastructure usage, data management and application development - but also patterns in research, such as Open Science and FAIR data. Identifying patterns and anti-patterns in e-Research application development will help the participants' use cases become more robust, deployable and reliable.

The FutureGateway framework

• Riccardo Bruno (INFN Catania - Italy)

Room: Department of Computer Science In this section will be first introduced the FutureGateway (FG) framework, described each of its components and explained how they work together. During the presentation will be also covered some security considerations related to the Science Gateway membership handling using as point of reference the standard baseline AAI mechanism provided by the standard FG installation and how to modify it to switch between already existing AAI mechanisms. The FutureGateway provides also a complete set of REST APIs to manage distributed computing resources, which will be briefly described.

The FutureGateway framework - warm up

• Bruce Becker (CSIR - South Africa)
• Mario Torrisi (University of Catania - Italy)

Room: Department of Computer Science In this hands-on section participants will be provided with examples of how to use FutureGateway APIs to submit and monitor jobs as well as to retrieve their output upon completion. REST calls will be done using the curl command, the postman tool and some PHP code.

The gLibrary framework

• Antonio Calanducci (University of Catania - Italy)

Room: Department of Computer Science In this presentation, we introduce gLibrary 2.0, a platform that permits to create REST APIs over existing databases or new datasets. It supports both relational and non-relational (i.e. schema-less) datasets. It also provides data storage services to Grid and Cloud (OpenStack-based) Storage Servers. After a general overview and the architecture, we will show live how to create a new repository, importing data collections from an existing database, creating new collections from scratch, make queries and use replicas/attachments to handle file transfers.

The gLibrary Framework - warm up

• Mario Torrisi (University of Catania - Italy)

Room: Department of Computer Science In this hands-on section participants will be provided with examples of how to use gLibrary APIs. REST calls will be done using the curl command and/or the postman tool.

Programmatic interaction with Open Access Repositories

• Roberto Barbera (University of Catania - Italy)

Room: Department of Computer Science In this section we will introduce the concept of Digital Asset Management System and talk about the programmatic interaction with Open Access Repositories (based on Invenio). Thenl, we will show how submit different types of resource manually through the repository. After that, we will start with the programmatic interaction with Open Access Repository through the use of APIs for data searching, downloading and uploading. We will have a brief look at the MARCXML tags. At the end, we will see how to interact with the Open Access Repository using the OAI-PMH standard protocol and how to provide authorship to research products stored on an Open Access Repository.

Programmatic interation with Open Access Repository - warm up

• Mario Torrisi (University of Catania - Italy)

Room: Department of Computer Science In this hand-on section participants will be provided with examples of how to use Invenio RESTful APIs to interact with an Open Access Repository. REST calls will be done using the curl command and/or some PHP code.

Scientific use cases supported by the Sci-GaIA project

• Mario Torrisi (University of Catania - Italy)

Room: Department of Computer Science In this section we will report on the implementation status of each of the use cases selected for the past hackfests and supported thereafter. We will underly their scientific and social relevance and briefly describe the tools and the technologies adopted.

Investigating a Science Gateway for an agent-based simulation application using Repast

• Adedeji Fabiyi (Brunel University London - UK)

Room: Department of Computer Science The Repast-infection-model is an example of an Agent-Based Simulation Infection Model implemented in the well-known Repast Simphony agent-based simulation toolkit. Agent-based simulation is a highly useful technique that allows individuals and their behaviours to be represented as they interact over time. This means that, with appropriate data, agent-based simulation can be used to study various socio-medical phenomena such as the spread of disease and infection in a population. In this section we will show how a science gateway could support the study of the spread of disease or infection in a population. As well as having direct healthcare application, it can also be used in the field of health economics to study the cost effectiveness of various infection preventive strategies.

The MIPAR portal

• Benjamin Aribisala (Lagos State University - Nigeria)
• Olusola Olabanjo (Lagos State University - Nigeria)

Room: Department of Computer Science The Medical Image Processor and Repository (MIPAR) is an e-Infrastructure that contains image repository and image processing tools. The image repository lets users share their images with other researchers. They can upload their images so that others can have access to them and they can also download any image from the repository at no cost. The image processing tools give users the opportunity to process their images on a Distributed Computing Infrastructure. In this section we present the portal and its functionalities and we will show and discuss the code used to interact with the various e-Infrastructure services (FutureGateway, Open Access Repository, Identity Federation, etc.)

Breast cancer computer aided opinion with WEKA

• Mario Torrisi (University of Catania - Italy)

Room: Department of Computer Science In this section we present the portlet that has been developed to integrate the Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis (WEKA) collection of machine learning algorithms for data mining tasks in the Africa Grid Science Gateway. We will show the functionalities of the application and we will show and discuss the code used to interact with the various e-Infrastructure services (FutureGateway, Open Access Repository, etc.).