Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Intelligent Agents and Web Services
Alasdair Allan
Tim Naylor
University of Exeter
Iain Steele
Dave Carter
Jason Etherton
Chris 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 1216 2003 STAR
The eSTAR Project
Initally funded by the Department of Trade and Industry
as an eScience 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 1216 2003 STAR
Unique Ideas
Two fundamental ideas behind the project which makes
it 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 1216 2003 STAR
The Observational Grid
Multiagent system using the contract model.
No overall supervisor, which gives scalability. IA's submit
requests to nodes on the network, not commands.
IA's also do datamining from databases such as SIMBAD
and ADS, catalogues such as the USNOA2, and surveys
such as the DSS.
Databases are only special cases of telescopes, that
can return data instantly, no other difference.
IVOA Interoperability Meeting May 1216 2003 STAR
Overall Architecture Surveys + Catalogues
Intelligent Agents Telescope + Pipeline
The Grid
Bibliographic Database
Object Database
IVOA Interoperability Meeting May 1216 2003 STAR
The Intelligent Agent (IA)
Can view the system as a unified information grid, within
which intelligent agents live.
IA's are developed by astronomers to address their own
science drivers, the agents can request and interpret data.
Scalable, multiple agents can talk to multiple nodes.
eSTAR is the only group applying the emerging agent
technologies to astrophysics.
IVOA Interoperability Meeting May 1216 2003 STAR
eSTAR Prototype
IVOA Interoperability Meeting May 1216 2003 STAR
eSTAR Next Generation
In collaboration with Tim Jenness, Frossie Economou
and Nial Tanvir we intend to deploy the eSTAR system
onto UKIRT and the JCMT within the next couple of
months to perform automated γ Ray Burst followup
Reacts to γ Ray alert from IBAS via TCP socket
•
Carries out JHK photometry
ORACDR reduces data, returns data products
Agent analyses products, crosscorrelates 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
IVOA Interoperability Meeting May 1216 2003 STAR
Other Telescopes...
The eSTAR system will also be deployed onto the
Liverpool Telescope and the two Faulkes Telescopes
over 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 interfacing
the system with P2PP shouldn't pose significant problems.
IVOA Interoperability Meeting May 1216 2003 STAR
IA Architecture
Multiagent Collaborative Model
IVOA Interoperability Meeting May 1216 2003 STAR
eSTAR Next Generation
IVOA Interoperability Meeting May 1216 2003 STAR
What has this to do with Web Services?
Intelligent Agents are both providers and consumers
of web and grid services.
Consumers
e.g. name resolution, catalogues and databases,
biblographic services, surveys
Importance of metadata can not be over stressed.
Providers
e.g. access to telescopes, “agents as processes”
IVOA Interoperability Meeting May 1216 2003 STAR
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” and
is an XML dialect meant to enable the transparent use
of remote telescopes.
Originally developed by Rick Hessman for the Berkeley's
HandsOn Universe Project. Other groups, such as eSTAR,
have made additions and contributed to the development
of the standard.
See http://sunra.lbl.gov/rtml/ for information about RTML.
IVOA Interoperability Meeting May 1216 2003 STAR
But Agents can also provide...
Agents can also provide services, independent of
telescopes, as providers of “processes” resulting in
science 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 γ Ray bursts, and URI's of associated
resources, such as SPI ACS lightcurves.
IVOA Interoperability Meeting May 1216 2003 STAR
What Sort of Science Products?
Other science products that can be produced by eSTAR's
agents include,
Colourmagnitude diagrams
Lightcurves, trailed spectrograms
Periodograms (e.g. FT, or χ2 periodogram)
•
Can be provided transparently to the user as the agent
has knowledge of both resources available on the Grid
and processes to create these products.
IVOA Interoperability Meeting May 1216 2003 STAR
Middleware Implications of Agents
PPARC funded eScience 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?
IVOA Interoperability Meeting May 1216 2003 STAR
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
IVOA Interoperability Meeting May 1216 2003 STAR
Summary
It is important that federated databases and telescopes
share a common interface, there is no fundamental
difference between them other than the time it takes
to return the data and the date stamp.
We believe that power users of the grid will use intelligent
agents technology and not dumb applications.
See our website http://www.estar.org.uk/ for more details
about the project. Some links to recent papers about
eSTAR can be found on my IVOA Wiki Users Page.
IVOA Interoperability Meeting May 1216 2003 STAR