On 1 September the three-year DILIGENT project started with a kick-off meeting in Pisa, Italy. Building on past activities in both the Grid and digital-library domains, the project will develop a digital-library infrastructure to allow members of dynamic virtual organizations to exploit shared knowledge and physical resources.
Research groups today often consist of people from institutes spread around the world who form virtual organizations to share their resources for the duration of the collaboration. The DILIGENT project aims to support this new operational mode for research by creating an infrastructure that will allow members of the virtual organizations to access shared knowledge, services and computational resources in a secure, co-ordinated and cost-effective way.
By merging Grid and digital-library technologies, DILIGENT will provide the foundations for collaboration environments that will be able to serve many different research and industrial applications. The Grid framework will also enable new functions, whose implementation has until now been limited by high cost in terms of computational, storage and data-transfer capacity, such as multimedia document and geographic information processing, 3D handling or spatial data manipulation.
DILIGENT will be built upon efforts by the EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-science in Europe) project, which will deliver a Grid production infrastructure in the next two years. The DILIGENT testbed will be demonstrated and validated by two complementary real-life application scenarios from the environmental e-Science and the culture heritage domain.
It is expected that a Grid-based digital-library infrastructure will be adopted and extended by several other communities - some of which have already registered as observers - to serve different application areas. Regular training sessions and workshops will be conducted to disseminate the results and experiences of the DILIGENT project to both scientists and potential DILIGENT users.
• Information on the project and how to become a DILIGENT observer will be made available at www.diligentproject.org
Author:
Compiled by Hannelore Hämmerle and Nicle Crémel