Research Projects & Partners

D-Grid

Project Goal: The goal of this project is to expand the existing D-Grid infrastructure with an interface for commercial compute Clouds.
Solution Description: The new interface, which is provided by fluid Operations’ eCloudManager, will enable D-Grid to expand its customer base to include SMEs, thereby achieving an economically sustainable Grid. To reach the project goal, D-Grid will rely on the fluid Operations eCloudManager to provide a Self-Service component which will allow customers to deploy their applications, manage their deployments and monitor their Grid usage. Similarly, D-Grid operators can use the eCloudManager to manage resource provisioning, data center operations, and billing and accounting.

NewProt

Project Goal: Development of a Self-Service Portal for protein engineering software and databases. The project is funded by the European Union, it started in December 2011 and will run for four years.
Solution Description: The Self-Service Portal is based on the technologies delivered by the Information Workbench and the eCloudManager Product Suite from fluid Operations. The Information Workbench provides a work environment which allows users to easily interact with all NewProt resources. Leveraging the Information Workbench’s semantic technologies, the Self-Service Portal will ensure the semantic interoperability of data and software, and will use common standards (RDF and Linked Data), as well as relevant domain ontologies such as EDAM (bioinformatic data ontology), OBO (Open Biomedical Ontologies) and the GO Gene Ontology.
Leveraging the eCloudManager’s ability to deliver entire application landscapes on-demand, the Self-Service Portal will be designed such that all partners can instantiate private copies of the Self-Service Portal (e.g. for in-house use) if and whenever desired. To this end, the Self-Service Portal will be made available as a virtual machine image that can be instantiated on private infrastructures e.g. VMware, or, if needed, in public clouds.

GovWILD

Project Goal: The Hasso-Plattner-Institut, IBM and fluidOps are driving the GovWILD project (Government Web Data Integration for Linked Data), a part of the Open Government Data initiatives. The project aims at making public government data transparent and freely available.
Solution Description: The Information Workbench integrates large amounts of freely available data about politicians and companies in the U.S. and Germany, and links them in one central place with freely available data stored in different data sources. The GovWILD project is part of the LOD cloud.

„Vernetztes Deutschland: GeoNachbarschaft“ (“Networked Germany: Geo Neighbourhood”)

Project Goal: The flagship project under the direction of the Commission for Geo-Information Management of the German Ministry of Economics and Technology outlines the opportunities and challenges for establishing semantic relationships between freely available geographic information and statistical data from various sectors such as: land use, locations, traffic, population and crime statistics.
Solution Description:
Prototype of a Real Estate Portal: The portal displays information about the property and automatically provides additional local information and relevant environmental data, such as information about kindergartens, schools, doctors in the area, noise pollution, crime rates, age structure and land use. Freely available regional economic data can also be integrated. This helps companies to reach well-informed decisions when e.g. deciding where to set up new offices.
Mobile Applications Mobile applications provide users with information about their immediate environment such as population density, crime rate, average salary or similar data, depending on the users’ location.

Follow this link for further information about the project GeoNeighbourhood.

On-Demand Access to Open Data

Project Goal: The project aims to provide Open Government Data using a Self-Service Portal, to prepare and to analyze data and to develop a repository for freely available data sources.
Solution Description: The Information Workbench is used as frontend to support end-user oriented interaction with the data, including search for datasets, visual exploration of the data and metadata, Mash-Ups and widgets to visualize and analyze the data, interface for user-friendly structured queries across multiple and federated data sources.