UNIVERSIT`
A DI PISA
DIPARTIMENTO DI INGEGNERIA DELL’INFORMAZIONE
Dottorato di Ricerca in Ingegneria dell’Informazione
Activity Report by the Student Luca FROSINI - PhD cycle XXXI
Tutor(s): Prof.ssa Cinzia Bernardeschi, Dr. Pasquale Pagano, Prof. Alessio Vecchio
1. Research Activity
The design of an Information System (IS) for federated research infrastructures enabling Virtual Research Environments (VREs) has guided my doctoral activity. Hence, the dissertation ranges over three different research contexts: information systems, research infrastructure (federation of them), and virtual research environments. For each involved research context, it has been crucial to make an analysis of the state-of-the-art and to identify the emerging effects of composing them. This activity led to the identification of the main characteristics of the information system [J3][J4]. The analysis of the state-of-the-art revealed issues and limitations as well as unexpected challenges regarding the resource model, the multi-tenancy support, the scalability, and the types of consistency to provide. Modelling and designing a resource model for the information system able to overcome the identified state-of-the-art limitations guided the first year doctoral activity. This model has been tailored for specific scientific contexts through concrete proposals [J1][C1] resulting from the experience maturated in different European projects BlueBRIDGE (grant no. 675680); EGIEngage (grant no. 654142); ENVRIplus (grant no. 654182); PARTHENOS (grant no. 654119); SoBigData (grant no. 654024).
The second year has been spent in: (i) defining a multi-tenant approach supporting consistent and hierarchical views; (ii) validating the proposed approaches by realising a complete scalable software solution that has been approved as an official subsystem of the gCube open-source framework. It has then be adopted by the D4Science research infrastructure that offers its services and capacities to a multitude of international stakeholders; (iii) specialising the resource model to support the ontological PARTHENOS Entity Model (defined by ontology experts). The information system software architecture has been recommended as a component of the framework for digital human infrastructure federation [O1][J2].
In the third year: (i) the research proposal has been consolidated; (ii) the information system has been enhanced to solve the issues and satisfy new requirements identified by the exploitation performed in D4Science research infrastructure. The consolidated version has been proposed as the key service for the infrastructure federation and VREs management [J4]; (iii) a proposal for supporting transactions which do not reduce the scalability of the system has been formulated.
The transaction models available in literature violate one or more of REST principles although it has been well demonstrated that REST (REpresentational State Transfer) is an excellent architectural style to achieve scalability of a system while keeping the complexity at an affordable cost. For such a reason, it has been defined a REST transaction model which respects all the REST principles.
The challenges in designing a REST transaction model are related to the ”contrast” between the stateless principle of REST (i.e. the server does not store any information of the previous interaction with the client) and the intrinsically statefull nature of the transactions.
The defined transaction model has been designed for general purpose system (not only to satisfy the needs of the information system). With the proposed approach, the REST service does not require any change. Instead, three additional components have been designed to enable the transaction capabilities: (i) transaction manager, (ii) lock manager and (iii) transaction proxy.
-The lock manager is responsible for allowing or denying concurrent access to the resources using locks. The transaction proxy intercepts all the requests directed to the REST service to grant the access to the resources requested by the client and exposed by the real service. The transaction proxy uses the transaction manager to record each request made in the transaction. The transaction manager is responsible for creating a transaction and committing or roll-backing the transaction using the compensation procedure that exploits the information on the actions performed in the transaction as recorded by the transaction proxy.
The proposed transaction model is resilient to failures (i.e., ability to provide and maintain the service in the case of faults and challenges to normal operation) and it supports distributed transactions (i.e. transactions involving different REST services).
The dissertation will deliver a complete design for the information system which consists of: (i) a flexible resource model; (ii) a multi-tenant approach which provides consistent views on a common resource space ; (iii) a scalable software architecture compliant with REST architectural style; (iv) a REST transaction model. All identified open research issues and challenges have been satisfied and validated in real scenarios in the D4Science infrastructure.
2. Formation Activity • 2016
– Middleware and robotic software programming (3 Credits - Internal) – Academic Writing and Presentation Skills - Livello C1 (4 Credits - Internal) • 2017
– Linked Open Data: a paradigm for the Semantic Web (3 Credits - Internal)
– Mathematical Modeling Issues in the Future Multiservice Networks (5 Credits - Internal) – Using e-Infrastructures for Biodiversity Conservation (5 Credits - Internal)
– Academic Writing and Presentation Skills C1+ (5 Credits - Internal)
– From Classical Distributed Systems to Cloud Computing (5 Credits - Internal) • 2018
– Continuous monitoring of health and well-being using wearable sensors (3 Credits - Internal) – Formal methods for cyber security and malware detection (4 Credits - Internal)
TOTAL CREDITS: 37
Publications
International Journals:
J1 Frosini, L., Pagano, P. (2018). A Facet-based Open and Extensible Resource Model for Research Data Infrastructures. Grey Journal. (Vol. 14, pp. 69-76).
J2 Frosini, L., Bardi, A., Manghi, P., Pagano, P. (2018). An Aggregation Framework for Digital Humanities Infrastructures - The PARTHENOS Experience. SCIRES-IT - SCIentific RESearch and Information Technology. (Vol. 8(1), pp. 33–50).
-J3 Assante, M., Candela, L., Castelli, D., Cirillo, R., Coro, G., Frosini, L., Lelii, L., Mangiacrapa, F., Marioli, V., Pagano, P., Panichi, G., Perciante, C., Sinibaldi, F. (June 2019) The gCube System: Delivering Virtual Research Environments as-a- Service. Future Generation Computer Systems (Vol. 95, pp. 445-453).
J4 Assante, M., Candela, L., Castelli, D., Cirillo, R., Coro, G., Frosini, L., Lelii, L., Mangiacrapa, F., Pagano, P., Panichi, G., Sinibadi, F. Enabling Open Science by gCube and D4Science. Future Generation Computer Systems (Minor Revision Requested May 1st, 2019).
International Conferences:
C1 Frosini, L., Pagano, P. (2017, October). A Facet-based Open and Extensible Resource Model for Research Data Infrastructures. 19th Conference in Grey Literature (GL 19) – Public Awareness and Access to Grey Literature. (Vol. 19, pp. 113-120) TextRelease, 2018.
Others:
O1 Bardi, A., Frosini, L. (2017,October). Building a federation of digital humanities infrastructures. ERCIM News. (Vol. 111, pp. 28-29) ERCIM News.
Chapter in Book:
1. Frosini, L., Patern`o, F. (2016). Security in User Interfaces Distributed Amongst Dynamic Sets of Devices and Users. In: Anslow C., Campos P., Jorge J. (eds) Collaboration Meets Interactive Spaces. Springer, Cham.
Technical Reports:
1. Candela, L., Frosini, L., Pagano, P. (2016, September). The gCube Information System: Assessment of Enabling Technologies. ISTI Technical Report N. 2016-TR-32.
2. Candela, L., Frosini, L., Pagano, P. (2016, September). Devising a Resource Model for an Open and Heterogeneous Data Infrastructure: the gCube Approach. ISTI Technical Report N. 2016-TR-31. 3. Assante, M., Candela, L., Frosini, L., Lelii, L., Pagano, P., Pieve, A. (2016, September). The gCube
Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting Infrastructure. ISTI Technical Report N. 2016-TR-30. European Community Deliverable:
1. Candela, L., Coro, G., Fabriani, P., Frosini, L., Galante, N. A., Giammatteo, G., Pavia, D., Kakaletris, G., Lelii, L., Simi, M., Sinibaldi, F., Koltisida, P. (2018, January) D10.2 - BlueBRIDGE Resources Federation Facilities: Revisited Version. Building Research environments for fostering Innovation, Decision making, Governance and Education to support Blue growth.
2. Frosini, L., Assante, M., Dell’Amico, A., Lelii, L., Candela, L., Pagano, P. (2017, November) D6.3 -Report on the implementation of the Joint Resource Registry (interim). Pooling Activities, Resources and Tools for Heritage E-research Networking, Optimization and Synergies.
3. Aloia, N., Candela, L., Debole, F., Frosini, L., Lorenzini, M., Pagano, P. (2017, April) D5.2 - Design of the Joint Resource Registry. Pooling Activities, Resources and Tools for Heritage E-research Networking, Optimization and Synergies.
4. Pagano, P., Candela, L., Assante, M., Frosini, L., Manghi, P., Bardi, A., Sinibaldi, F. (2016, October) D6.1 - PARTHENOS Cloud Infrastructure. Pooling Activities, Resources and Tools for Heritage E-research Networking, Optimization and Synergies.
5. Assante, M., Candela, L., Frosini, L., Lelii, L., Mangiacrapa, F., Pagano, P. (2016, August) D10.12 - VRE Specification and Software 1. SoBigData Research Infrastructure Social Mining & Big Data Ecosystem.
6. Assante, M., Candela, L., Frosini, L., Lelii, L., Mangiacrapa, F., Pagano, P. (2016, July) D10.5 -SoBigData e-Infrastructure software release 1. -SoBigData Research Infrastructure Social Mining & Big Data Ecosystem.
7. Candela, L., Coro, G., Frosini, L., Galante, N. A., Giammatteo, G., Kakaletris, G., Lelii, L., Marioli, V., Sinibaldi, F. (2016, May) D10.1 - BlueBRIDGE Resources Federation Facilities. Building Research environments for fostering Innovation, Decision making, Governance and Education to support Blue growth.
8. Giammatteo, G., Frosini, L., Laskaris, N. (2015, October) D4.1 - Software Release Procedure and Tools. Building Research environments for fostering Innovation, Decision making, Governance and Education to support Blue growth.
<Pisa>, <10/05/19>
The student Luca FROSINI
