Doc. Eurostat/ITDG/October 2011/3.1
IT Directors' Group
18 and 19 October 2011
BECH Building, 5, rue Alphonse Weicker, Luxembourg-Kirchberg
Room QUETELET
ESSnet CORE:
Common Reference Environment
Objectives, Organization and State of the Art
Item 3.1 of the agenda
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Common Reference Environment (CORE) ESSnet
Objectives, Organization and State of the Art
1. OBJECTIVES
The ESSnet COmmon Reference Environment (CORE) is financed by Eurostat under 2010 Statistical Workprogramme. CORE started on December 2010 and will end on January 2012. It involves six NSIs as participants, specifically: Istat (Italian National Institute of Statistics) as coordinator, CBS (Statistics Netherlands), SSB (Statistics Norway), INE (Portugal Statistics), SCB (Statistics Sweden), and INSEE (France). Moreover, CORE has the following external observers: Mr. Tomaz Speh (Slovenia) and Mr. Alistar Hamilton (Australia).
CORE ESSnet continues the work started on CORA (COmmon Reference Architecture) ESSnet. More specifically, CORA has produced the definition of an architectural model, starting from which CORE extends the architectural model by defining a complete information model composed by services and processes.
In the following, CORE objectives will be detailed with respect to the design, implementation and testing aspects.
With respect to the design aspect, CORE has the following objective:
· design of an environment for the definition and execution of statistical processes. A process will be defined in terms of services selected by an available repository; the composed workflow will be automatically executed.
With respect to the implementation aspect, CORE has the following objectives:
· selection of a middleware solution already available for the process execution;
· realisation of an environment able to permit the execution of processes. This environment will be composed of: (i) friendly interfaces that enable the definition of CORE processes by statistical users; (ii) integration APIs and a repository of integration layers.
With respect to the testing phase, CORE has the following objectives:
· realisation of processes starting from services implementing some GSBPM blocks;
· evaluation of costs related to integration;
· implementation of a prototype.
2. ORGANIZATION
The work of the ESSnet is organized in seven work-packages, specifically:
· WP1 – Project Management
· WP2 - Design of the Information Model according to GSBPM and alignment with NSIs information models
· WP3 - Generic Interface Design for interconnecting GSBPM sub-processes
· WP4 - Research Workflow Solutions for process management
· WP5 - Implementation Library for generic interface and production chain for .NET
· WP6 - Implementation Library for generic interface and production chain for Java
· WP7 - Project Dissemination and Integration Cost Reporting
The participation to each WP by each partner is detailed in Figure 1.
Istat / CBS / SSB / INE / SCB / INSEEWP1 / C / P / P / P / P / P
WP2 / P / P / P / P / P / P
WP3 / C / P / P / P
WP4 / P / P / P / P / C
WP5 / C
WP6 / C / P
WP7 / P / P / C / P / P / P
Figure 1. Participation to WPs (C=coordination, P=participation)
In the following, the structure of each work-package and its goals are shown.
2.1.1. WP1- Project Management
WP1, coordinated by Istat, started in month M1 and will end in month M13.
This WP deals with the administrative duties of management. Its objective is to ensure the achievement of its aims, objectives, and deliverables in accordance with its schedule and budget ensuring the quality of the outcomes of the project.
2.1.2. WP2 - Design of the Information Model according to GSBPM and alignment with NSIs information models
WP2, coordinated by CBS, started in month M1 and ended in month M7.
The main objectives of this WP are the creation of a generic information model for the statistical process and the development of a method to map it onto the business model of any NSIs demonstrating the applicability of the model.
2.1.3. WP3 - Generic Interface Design for interconnecting GSBPM sub-processes
WP3, coordinated by Istat, started in month M4 and will end in month M11.
This WP has the main objective to design the software environment able to support the information model defined in WP2. Starting from WP2’s results, a detailed design of the supporting software environment must be realised specifying the services for the implementation of processes to be executed in the framework, defining such processes, and, finally, defining the data and related metadata that will be exchanged between tools. The possibility of using SDMX as a basis for exchanging data will be studied and feedback will be provided for the ESSnet SDMX.
2.1.4. WP4 - Research Workflow Solutions for process management
WP4, coordinated by INSEE, started in month M4 and will end in month M10.
The objective of this WP is to study different work-flow solutions for process management that includes the design of the chain of sub-processes, its modeling, execution, monitoring and optimization. Moreover, the implementation of CORA services and the relation between their sub-processes can be very different: web services call, manual intervention, etc. Thus, the selected solutions will have to support these different interactions. Both open source tools and proprietary software are considered in order to have a complete assessment of the state of the art.
2.1.5. WP5 - Implementation Library for generic interface and production chain for .NET and WP6 - Implementation Library for generic interface and production chain for Java
WP5, coordinated by CBS, and WP6, coordinated by Istat, started in month M6 and will end in month M13.
These WPs have the aim of providing a working solution that permits the automatic execution of selected GSBPM sub-processes starting from WP3 and WP4 results. WP5 will provide an implementation in .NET while WP6 will provide an implementation in Java that are respectively proprietary and open languages, thus demonstrating the technological independence of the CORE design.
2.1.6. WP7 - Project Dissemination and Integration Cost Reporting
WP7, coordinated by SSB, started in month M1 and will end in month M13.
The main objectives of this WP are the dissemination activity of the CORE results and the integration cost reporting concerning the time spent on integration for the sub-processes in WP5 and WP6.
3. State of the art
In this section the state of the art of each WP is detailed.
3.1.1. WP1- Project Management
The following meetings have been held:
· kick-off meeting - Luxembourg, 17-18 January 2011;
· Lisbon meeting – Lisbon 28-29 March 2011;
· Intermediate meeting – Paris 20-21 June 2011;
· Rome meeting – Rome 03-04 October 2011.
The meetings were very important for work organization and partners’ coordination. Each of the meetings was successful with respect to both partners’ participation and involvement.
The following deliverables have been released:
· Deliverable 1.1 Preliminary Report published on month M3;
· Deliverable 1.2 Intermediary Report published on month M8.
Another important activity performed by WP1 is the interaction between CORE ESSnet and SDMX ESSnet. Two meetings have been held at Istat in May 2011 and July 2011 during which the usage of SDMX within CORE scenario for dissemination has been discussed together with possible solutions to map CORE and SDMX models.
3.1.2. WP2 - Design of the Information Model according to GSBPM and alignment with NSIs information models
To succeed the objective of WP2 to design an information model, an in-depth requirements analysis has been done. WP3, WP5 and WP6 have been seen as internal stakeholders while ESSnet observers have been seen as external stakeholders. The needs of these NSIs have been analyzed and features have been specified to meet their requirements. A deliverable (2.1 Requirements), containing the results of this analysis has been released on month M2.
In accordance with these requirements, a generic statistical information model has been defined. This result is contained in deliverable 2.2 Information model, the final version of which has been delivered in month M8.
3.1.3. WP3 - Generic Interface Design for interconnecting GSBPM sub-processes
To succeed the goals of WP3, a first set of technical specifications for CORE have been provided. The level of detail of such specifications is intended as an input for a lower level design, in which specific technological choices, with respect to the platform implementation, will be taken. Most of the provided specifications have been implemented as demonstration prototypes using Java language.
Moreover, a concrete real scenario has been selected as an empirical test-bed during the whole implementation cycle of the CORE environment.
The technical specifications of the environment are described in deliverable 3.1 Technical Environment Specification vs1, delivered in month M8.
3.1.4. WP4 - Research Workflow Solutions for process management
As first step to succeed WP4 objectives, an evaluation grid usable to evaluate different tools has been realised, defining the two dimensions that we used to evaluate and compare different tools. These results are illustrated in deliverable 4.1 Evaluation grid delivered in month M5.
Moreover, a process scenario to evaluate tools with the aim of finding efficient tools to support the activities of interactions between services designed has been realised. Both open source and proprietary solutions are considered in order to have a more complete assessment of the state of the art. As the implementation of services and the relation between their sub-processes can be different i.e. web services call, manual intervention, etc. we have analyzed solutions that can support all these different interactions. A list of tools has been created for Java technology, and is in progress for .Net technology. An important result is the realisation of a web service respecting WP2 model (released during M6). This web service will be included in a process to evaluate tools.
3.2. deliverables
In Table 1 the deliverables published are summarized.
Deliverable #. / Deliverable Name / WP no. / Deliverable Date(Project month)
1.1 / Preliminary Report / 1 / M3
1.2 / Intermediate Report / 1 / M8
2.1 / Requirements / 2 / M3
2.2 / Generic statistical information model / 2 / M8
3.1 / Technical Environment Specification vs1 / 3 / M7
4.1 / Evaluation grid used to evaluate the different tools / 4 / M5
Table 1. Deliverables published
4. DISSEMINATION
The dissemination activities are WP7 objectives. To succeed in this goal we have achieved the following:
· CORE website hosted by Eurostat (www.essnet-portal.eu/project-information/core). This gives public access to a short presentation of the project, a list of the participants and downloadable versions of deliverables. We have decided to publish the deliverables under the Creative Common license "Attribution-Share Alike - 3.0" (available at the Internet site: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0 ), to maximize the dissemination of the ESSnet results.
· CORE wiki hosted by Istat (https://www.wiki.istat.it/doku.php/start?idx=essnet_cra). The wiki is accessible by all CORE ESSnet participants, by external observer(s) of the ESSnet and by Eurostat. The wiki is not open to external people, because it is used only as a working area. The wiki is organized as follows:
§ Deliverables: in this section all the final deliverables are collected so that all the participants, any external observer(s) and Eurostat can always access to them.
§ Meetings: in this section the agenda of each held meeting together with the presentations, the minutes and the documentation necessary for the participants at the meeting are collected.
§ Annex 2: this section contains the final version of the Annex II and a list of all the partners.
§ Glossary: the purpose of this section is to develop the terminology of the CORE project. It will contain the definitions of all terms introduced in the CORA project and any term that we need for the concepts of the CORE project. This is where to make and discuss new proposals for terms that are not satisfactory.
§ Issues reviewed: this section structures the discussion about remaining issues for CORA / CORE in section 2.2 of CORA WP2.
§ Proposal documents: this section contains the final versions of the proposal.
§ Workflow solutions: this section structures the discussion about workflow solutions of CORE WP4.
§ WPs: this section contains early ideas, documents, comments related to each work-package while preparing the proposal.
CORE results have been presented at the following international meetings:
· New Techniques and Technologies for Statistics held in Brussels in 22-24 February 2011 (NTTS 2011)
· Joint UNECE/Eurostat/OECD Meeting on the Management of Statistical Information Systems MSIS held in Luxembourg 23-25 May 2011
· Statistical Information Systems Architecture and Integration (SISAI) held in Luxembourg 7 - 8 June 2011. At this meeting not only were CORE results presented but also the results of joint work between CORE and SDMX.
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