The Discovery cluster provides a medium for Federation members to coordinate on development, deployment, and creation of interoperable specifications for Discovery services such as OpenSearch, DataCasting, and ServiceCasting. As such, a common Testbed to deploy services and/or clients would enable the Federation members to test the interoperability of Discovery services and clients. Moreover, having a common Testbed where Federation members from various data centers can access would provide a common platform that can be used to advertise their services. Currently it is difficult to know where services exist, what they do, and how to access them. Several machine-processable mechanisms for advertising services (such as service casting) have been evaluated by the NASA Tech Infusion Working Group. The Testbed will provide an environment to demonstrate how Federation-wide member services can be advertised, described, and chained together using existing technologies. Form this, new capabilities can also be explored such as enabling an association of data to services where for each data collection or granule, compatible services provided by Federation members can be shown.
ESIP Community Befints: Improved interoperability of ESIP Discovery services and clients leading to broader adoption. Increased awareness and usage of Discovery services. Improved brokering of data collection and granules to compatible services that can use them.
Comments
Testbed scope
This is a good topic and we need everyone's thoughts about what the Testbed should be and how it should be implemented to support the ESIP community. I like Christine's suggestion that the Testbed should provide pointers to where services and capabilities reside. Along with that, it needs to provide a place for the community to review and comment on ongoing Testbed activities to help drive the development and prototyping. I would also like to see the ability to provide authorized Testbed participants with compute resources necessary to develop and deploy functionality for testing, demonstration and discussion.