STARIntelligent Agents and Web Services

Alasdair AllanTim Naylor University of Exeter

Iain SteeleDave CarterJason EthertonChris 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 12-16 2003 STAR

The eSTAR Project

Initally funded by the Department of Trade and Industryas an e-Science 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 12-16 2003 STAR

Unique Ideas

Two fundamental ideas behind the project which makesit 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 12-16 2003 STAR

The Observational Grid

Multi-agent system using the contract model.

No overall supervisor, which gives scalability. IA's submitrequests to nodes on the network, not commands.

IA's also do datamining from databases such as SIMBADand ADS, catalogues such as the USNO-A2, and surveyssuch as the DSS.

Databases are only special cases of telescopes, thatcan return data instantly, no other difference.

IVOA Interoperability Meeting May 12-16 2003 STAR

The Grid

Overall Architecture

STARIVOA Interoperability Meeting May 12-16 2003

Telescope + Pipeline

Bibliographic Database

Object Database

Intelligent Agents

Surveys + Catalogues

The Intelligent Agent (IA)

Can view the system as a unified information grid, withinwhich intelligent agents live.

IA's are developed by astronomers to address their ownscience drivers, the agents can request and interpret data.

Scalable, multiple agents can talk to multiple nodes.

eSTAR is the only group applying the emerging agenttechnologies to astrophysics.

STARIVOA Interoperability Meeting May 12-16 2003

eSTAR Prototype

IVOA Interoperability Meeting May 12-16 2003 STAR

eSTAR Next Generation

In collaboration with Tim Jenness, Frossie Economouand Nial Tanvir we intend to deploy the eSTAR systemonto UKIRT and the JCMT within the next couple ofmonths to perform automated - Ray Burst followup

Reacts to - Ray alert from IBAS via TCP socket Carries out JHK photometry ORAC-DR reduces data, returns data products Agent analyses products, cross-correlates 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

STARIVOA Interoperability Meeting May 12-16 2003

Other Telescopes...

The eSTAR system will also be deployed onto theLiverpool Telescope and the two Faulkes Telescopesover 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 interfacingthe system with P2PP shouldn't pose significant problems.

STARIVOA Interoperability Meeting May 12-16 2003

IA Architecture

STARIVOA Interoperability Meeting May 12-16 2003

Multi-agent Collaborative Model

eSTAR Next Generation

IVOA Interoperability Meeting May 12-16 2003 STAR

What has this to do with Web Services?

Intelligent Agents are both providers and consumersof web and grid services.

Consumers e.g. name resolution, catalogues and databases, biblographic services, surveys

Importance of meta-data can not be over stressed.

Providers e.g. access to telescopes, “agents as processes”

STARIVOA Interoperability Meeting May 12-16 2003

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” andis an XML dialect meant to enable the transparent useof remote telescopes.

Originally developed by Rick Hessman for the Berkeley'sHands-On Universe Project. Other groups, such as eSTAR,have made additions and contributed to the developmentof the standard.

See http://sunra.lbl.gov/rtml/ for information about RTML.

STARIVOA Interoperability Meeting May 12-16 2003

But Agents can also provide...

Agents can also provide services, independent of telescopes, as providers of “processes” resulting inscience 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 - Ray bursts, and URI's of associated resources, such as SPI ACS lightcurves.

STARIVOA Interoperability Meeting May 12-16 2003

What Sort of Science Products?

Other science products that can be produced by eSTAR's agents include,

Colour-magnitude diagrams

Lightcurves, trailed spectrograms

Periodograms (e.g. FT, or 2 periodogram)

Can be provided transparently to the user as the agenthas knowledge of both resources available on the Gridand processes to create these products.

STARIVOA Interoperability Meeting May 12-16 2003

Middleware Implications of Agents

PPARC funded e-Science 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?

STARIVOA Interoperability Meeting May 12-16 2003

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

STARIVOA Interoperability Meeting May 12-16 2003

Summary

It is important that federated databases and telescopesshare a common interface, there is no fundamentaldifference between them other than the time it takesto return the data and the date stamp.

We believe that power users of the grid will use intelligentagents technology and not dumb applications.

See our website http://www.estar.org.uk/ for more details about the project. Some links to recent papers abouteSTAR can be found on my IVOA Wiki Users Page.

STARIVOA Interoperability Meeting May 12-16 2003