Enabling easy access to Grid storage services and digital repositories

Abstract

Currently, storage services provided by Grid infrastructures have been mostly used by IT-experts scientists, managers, and researchers due to the their underlying complexities such as protocols, access mechanisms, and user unfriendly interfaces, often based on command line tools. In particular, one of the biggest obstacles that has until now prevented a large uptake of Grid infrastructures by large and diverse worldwide Virtual Research Communities is the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) on which the Grid Security Infrastructure (GSI) is based. This knowledge is indeed needed for the authentication and the management of X.509 certificates, a mandatory requirement to get access to distributed storage services. We propose a novel data management architecture, exploiting SAML based authentication, credential delegation, WebDAV and HTTP-standard redirections. This allows users to make use of their institutional credentials to authenticate and provide access to Grid data storage from Web applications, mobile, desktop and built-in clients of popular operating systems. On top of this service, we were able to design a digital asset management system, that promises to simplify the creation, management and access to large scale e- infrastructure based digital repositories aiming at permitting scientists, researchers, students to fully exploit them through tools they use everyday such as Web apps, portals and native mobile apps.