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Directory Services Project 1. Status of prototype (10 minutes)
2. LSI/LSA & SOM clustering results & new experiment tasks (20 minutes)
3. NSF Middleware Proposal (15 minutes) "A Repository Tool for Monitoring and Analysis of Directory Metadata" 4. Papers for AMCIS (Tampa, Aug 4-5) - topic possibilities (15 minutes) LSA vs SOM Genetic algorithm SFA and directory Next meeting: Friday, March 14, 3:30-5pm
A Repository Tool for Monitoring and Analysis of Directory Metadata LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) directory services enable data sharing by defining both the metadata (schema information) and an access protocol. Both the Internet2 higher education research community and the GRID community use LDAP structures describing people and computing resources to support their work. Increasingly, interoperation of LDAP directories is seen as a requirement to support education and research collaboration between distributed organizational entities and this interoperation requires significant coordination of directory architectures and standards for directory metadata. The Internet2 and GRID research community appreciates the importance of interoperation supported by standard LDAP schema structures, and is devoting resources to definition of metadata, recommendations for best practices, and guidelines for directories. Work is being done in a number of areas: § Defining and adopting standard metadata objects § Establishing mappings between various vendor implementations of LDAP § Establishing registries for several commonly used objects § Analyzing correctness of deployed objects Our research has led us to explore applying clustering algorithms to directory metadata and using graphic visualization techniques to present the results, based on the proposition that monitoring, clustering, and appropriate visualization of cross-organizational metadata can help to identify patterns of practice in metadata and to promote and facilitate the reuse of metadata, which in turn can lead to automatic dynamic evolution of standards. Our research prototype has the capability to automatically cluster metadata at a level that matches human expertise and uses several 2D or 3D visualization techniques to present the data. Further, we are exploring the possibility that we can use these methods to create unique signatures for directories, much the way in bio-informatics a micro-array of gene code sequences can uniquely identify genetic material. This leads us to the need for a repository of directory metadata so we can: · Establish a resource of unique directories · Enable the creation and store of time dated directory signatures · Provide a repository of templates as a reference library · Create a valuable research resource for further investigations · Enable comparison across directory domains. The broader impacts of this research are reflected in the proposers' ongoing practice: engagement of undergraduate and graduate students in all aspects of the work, including research, development, and publication; collaboration between information technology staff and academic faculty; collaboration between institutions; participation in Internet2 and NSF Middleware Integration Testbed program to enhance research and education infrastructure. The proposed research can have broad societal impact in enhancing interoperation, semantic resolution, standards evolution and management of directory metadata that is fundamentally basic to effective inter-organizational collaboration and access to data, applications, and resources that are deployed on the World Wide Web. |
Last Updated: March 2, 2006