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Service orientation: catalogue of services and TRLs

  • Jarkko Siren profile
    Jarkko Siren
    22 October 2015 - updated 4 years ago
  • 3 comments
    Total votes: 4

Already in the e-infrastructure WP2014-15 proposers were encouraged "to use discoverable service catalogues".  Hence some e-infrastructure projects have already planted the first seeds in form of online service portfolios. Examples include EGI.eu or GEANT. GEANT has also developed a service portfolio together with the NRENs. Helix Nebula developed an approach in relation to cloud services. Many initiatives provide listings with service descriptions (e.g. http://eudat.eu/services).

Annex D of the WP2016-17 mandates that "all services developed by projects should be made discoverable on-line, e.g. by including them in searchable catalogues or registries of (digital) research services with the metadata for describing and accessing the service". In relation to Service Activities (SA) they "must provide an adequate description of the services provided in the form of a catalogue of services". This aspect is even included as proposal evaluation criterion. Together with the notion of TRLs it defines the service orientation approach to e-infrastructures and the separation in 2 themes: integration and prototypes (as described in another blog post on TRLs).

It is foreseen that a web portal will publish the different e-infrastructure service catalogues (see INFRASUPP-03-2017). But further collaborative efforts on common or harmonized catalogues might improve the user experience further. Relevant step in that direction could be the FitSM set of standards developed with support from FP7.

Overall it seems that discussions on collaborative efforts are needed to realize the objectives described above. In addition to open discussion on the topic, also your reflections around the following questions are welcome:

  • Should European e-infrastructure service catalogues be centralised, distributed, federated, …?
  • What other past efforts could offer useful contributions (mapping of e-infrastructure initiatives, etc.)?
  • -Can the FitSM standards contribute to the harmonisation of service catalogues?
  • -Are the WP2016-17 requirements regarding service catalogues clear to you?
  • -How can we facilitate the discoverability, valorization and visibility of e-infrastructure services through service catalogues?
  • -How do you deal with hierarchies and other relationships between different services?
  • -Are there issues regarding SLAs in the context of e-infrastructure services?
  • -What common attributes should be defined for e-infrastructure services?
  • -Can we learn something from catalogues of software services and tools or repositories? What examples are useful? (e.g. NASA, DataOne, Zenodo, re3data.org)?
Tags: 
service catalogueTRLdigital servicese-infrastructures

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Chris Morris's picture
Chris Morris,
23/11/2015 12:33

The Elixir Tools and Data Services Registry is here https://bio.tools/.

It is a federated service, for reasons discussed in this paper: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26538599./

Total votes: 0
Tiziana Ferrari's picture
Tiziana Ferrari,
20/11/2015 17:42

The "Integration of data and computing services Cluster" at the 11th Concertation Meeting for Horizon2020 e-Infrastructure Projects agreed on the importance of collaborating based on the existing and planned services that each project will contribute to an integrated service portfolio, including production services and innovative ones under development. People acknowledged the importance of starting this work from the definition of a service template.

To kickoff the work toward a document that will describe the approach to build a service portfolio and the best practices, please look at the following resources:

1. The FitSM standard templates, and in particular the "Template: Service Design & Transition Package (SDTP)" that can be used to describe the service: http://fitsm.itemo.org/fitsm-templates-samples-guides
2. The guidelines "Identifying Services" and "Specifying Services" that help with a service-orientated approach in defining offered capabilities
3. The "Template: Service Portfolio / Catalogue entry"
4. A slide deck introducing FitSM: https://documents.egi.eu/document/2651

These resources provide templates and guidelines to define services, describe them, create and manage a service portfolio.

FitSM provides a very complete framework with useful templates to use. Pointers to similar resources are welcome!

Total votes: 2
Owen Appleton's picture
Owen Appleton (not verified),
23/10/2015 16:26

Jarkko

I think this is an interesting point and post. I agree that portfolios and catalogues must be harmonised, and I was happy to see this in the recent WP drafts, along with the crucial harmonisation of national roadmaps. However as with TRLs, one also needs the organisational infrastructure underlying these catalogues to make them really align to what providers deliver.

One thing I might suggest is to consider the creation of an expert group on eScience service management to allow those with expertise in the area to share it with the commission services even outside the context of projects. I am aware there was a Select Industry Group on Cloud SLAs that was somewhat analogous for those topics, but this would likely be less industrially driven.

Such a channel would likely assist with gathering data for the WP2018-20 which presumably will be starting its journey once WP2016-17 is finalised. I think now would be a great time to start such an effort.

Regards

Owen Appleton
Co-Author, FitSM standard / member of ITEMO FitSM working group

Total votes: 2