Ken Fraser

John Schostak
email: j.schostak@mmu.ac.uk

Edcity -

edCity -a New Learning Environment

Introduction

"Learning is clearly a social, constructive phenomenon. It occurs as a side effect of interactions, conversations and enhanced presence in dynamic Virtual Communities". [START_REF]ELeGI website[END_REF] The purpose of edCity is to provide a new kind of learning environment to meet the needs of users from the whole range of communities, private and public sector organisations that together compose a city. As a virtual city, edCity is open to all users globally and allows them to create their own communities, organisations and associated learning environments. It interfaces with the realities of people's lives by drawing upon social, economic, political, cultural, library, academic data and services provided by the whole range of public and private sectors. Since access is anywhere, anytime, for any purpose, for anyone, its uses are limited only by the imagination within legitimate boundaries. Pedagogically, the framework is open to tailoring learning strategies and support to individual, group, organisational and system needs. It can be employed for fun and curiosity. It can be applied to real life decision making and action scenarios. Ed-city does not exclude any pedagogical or learning philosophy or strategy. It provides the resources for all. It will be as applicable for teaching a toddler to read and write as for a surgeon examining the options for a patient or an urban regeneration policy maker exploring the potential social, economic and cultural impact of a range of alternative development proposals on communities. Pedagogically, Ed-City will itself learn the preferred learning strategies of its users.

edCity -Background

Many of the ideas now gaining currency in on-line education have been around several times before. Countries such as Finland saw very early that their survival as an economy in a globalising world was to be as a knowledge society (Framework Curriculum for the Comprehensive School 1994, Ministry of Education, Helsinki; Education, Training and Research in the Information Society: a national strategy 1995, Ministry of Education). Their strategy was to move away from a national curriculum to focus on the values and principles underpinning education in schools and communities which Schostak was involved in evaluating [START_REF] Norris | An Independent Evaluation of Comprehensive Curriculum Reform in Finland[END_REF] [START_REF] Norris | An Independent Evaluation of Comprehensive Curriculum Reform in Finland[END_REF] and to integrate this across society through research (see also [START_REF] Niemi | Towards a Learning Society in Finland: information and communications technology in teacher education[END_REF], [START_REF] Niemi | Towards a Learning Society in Finland: information and communications technology in teacher education[END_REF]. Sadly, at the same time the UK and other countries were moving in the opposite direction! At the heart of the Finnish innovation was the understanding that the range of contemporary knowledge was too great to be encapsulated in a common core curriculum and the demands for creativity, innovation and skills meant that people had to become flexible problem solvers in order to work within complex, rapidly changing global environments. The old structures did not work, they believed, and thus new ones were sought.

Something of this was expressed by Schostak [START_REF]Breaking into the Curriculum: the impact of information technology on schooling[END_REF] (1988) drawing upon his research on the impact of the new technologies in the UK throughout the 1980s:

The cultural richness of the world is immense. The computer, because of its networking capabilities, offers the curriculum developer gateways into an immense and open frontier of cultural experiences. Some will be fearful of this, wanting to close down possibilities in order to retain their own view of culture. Others will see it as an exciting change to explore and develop new ways of seeing and expressing experience in negotiation, or discussion, or dialogue, with their fellow explorers, both adults and children together. (Schostak p. 25) Information technology provided the opportunity for interesting new infrastructures and models for learning. In particular it offered the opportunity of: breaking into the hidden, controlling structures of schooling. "Hacking" [in an extended sense] is a metaphor here. By hacking into systems or programs, the hacker gains access to and is able to manipulate "private" information and program structures: hacking reveals the hidden. With access to knowledge, the hacker can act on (perhaps against) the hidden structures. (Schostak p. 4-5) The notion of hacking into the curriculum and structures of schooling can be seen as a positive process. Indeed, it is a metaphor for the process by which an individual or a community agency may transform the curriculum for personal and community purposes: to gain 'ownership', to enliven, to generate the conditions for creativity and change. In short, to innovate. This possibility has recently been re-echoed by Hargreaves [START_REF] Hargreaves | Education Epidemic: Transforming Secondary Schools Through Innovation Networks[END_REF], (2003). There is thus an important question at the back of this renewed interest in information technology: why has there been so little impact on curriculum, pedagogy and school organisation over the last 20 years despite so much research and the recycling of enthusiasms and ideas concerning the importance of information technology?

For a range of answers to this, one can turn to the many sociological studies of the social functions of schooling that have been carried out and more particularly to the ways in which innovations have been implemented (c.f. [START_REF] Pawson | Realistic Evaluation[END_REF], Pawson and Tilley 1997). Drawing upon these approaches Schostak [START_REF] Schostak | Understanding, Designing and Conducting Qualitative Research in Education[END_REF] (2002) has described the design features appropriate to generate the conditions under which an innovation can be implemented. Briefly, this involves ensuring that the following key dimensions are appropriately aligned and mutually supportive:

a) The broad vision, values and philosophies that underpin a large scale project need to be fully debated and the implications for the different interest groups of a community drawn out and placed into dialogue so that some key practical agreements can be reached.

b) The mechanisms, procedures and cultural practices appropriate to the broad vision need to identified. Too often, new ideas are implemented employing old practices:, inappropriate mechanisms and procedures. Innovations typically have the effect of de-skilling people used to the old ways. Also, any innovation is likely to undermine vested interests that the old ways supported. Hence, change is likely to be blocked by those who have something to lose. In particular, what do teachers feel they might lose when confronted with the innovations of online education?

c) The resources, the material infrastructures necessary to underpin ideas and action have to be in place otherwise all will be in vain. Crudely, there is no point hoping for mass use of streaming video services if the connection levels to a school are insufficient to support simultaneous access by hundreds of children. Without the infrastructure the vision will never be achieved.

Innovations, if they fail, will fail because they have neglected one or more of these dimensions. Thus the following will sketch an approach -edCity -that attempts to ensure that each of the dimensions for embedding innovations is taken into account.

ed-City Educational, Curricular, and Pedagogical Implications

The following sub-sections raise a number of issues and questions to be explored. It is argued that the next generation technologies implicit in the ed-City concept will create the conditions for a qualitative leap, a paradigm shift in the provision of education. However, the seeds of this shift and the educational philosophies appropriate to it have already been articulated.

Education, communities and intelligence

In contemporary multicultural, multiethnic, multi-faith, multilingual societies what counts as a community? ed-City explores this in relation to the new possibilities for communication, 'virtual meetings', 'chat rooms', and games that enable distributed networks of friends, people interested in similar topics and so on to develop communities of interest. An early focus on community and knowledge was put forward by Schostak [START_REF]Breaking into the Curriculum: the impact of information technology on schooling[END_REF] in terms of 'intelligence communities'.

Intelligence communities have always existed and are vital as tools for education and schooling. They are not the invention of the modern technologies. Nor are they idealistic deschooling conceptions. They are practical and already functioning groupings of enthusiasts and like-minded people. Individuals tend to seek out others, or associate with others having similar interests. In conversation (recall that one meaning of intelligence involves 'intercourse' or 'communication') they share views and criticise or explore the implications of certain views. In short, intelligence communities create intelligence, that is 'know-how', 'critical insight', 'informed opinion', 'intersubjectively validated facts', and other intelligent behaviours or products. ( [START_REF]Breaking into the Curriculum: the impact of information technology on schooling[END_REF], Schostak 1988 p. 227) A community of practice requires access to information of all kinds. However, intelligence and knowledge are more than just 'information'. Information has to be processed in various ways, critiqued and evaluated in relation to purposes. Thus:

Simple access to information is not enough. The part that educationalists can play is to provide resources for critical reflection and communicative action. This is where the deliberate recognition of and function of, intelligence communities is required. Schools as they presently exist can be redefined as resource centres providing centralised meeting places for individuals wishing to be placed into face-to-face contact with others sharing similar interests and concerns. ([9], Schostak p. 237) The role of educationalists to support, facilitate and guide is critical but not sufficient. The new technologies cross the boundaries of time and place, enabling the formation of communities not necessarily founded on or limited to face-to-face, temporally fixed, geographically defined spaces. What are the new practices that need to be developed in order to work in these new environments? How, in short, can we build communities of practice appropriate to the opportunities afforded by the new technologies implicit in the concept of ed-City?

As one example of what may be done, Stephen Heppel at Ultralab has sited a 'school' in a shopping mall shop unit in Christchurch, New Zealand, supported by on-line technologies. It transforms the notion of 'school spaces', enables them to be flexibly and cheaply sited to meet changing needs and circumstances as well as integrating learning into the institutions of everyday life rather than separating them in specialised places. Furthermore, the more flexible, virtual and time-free that on-line educational services become the less we will feel the need to send thousands of children to schools at the same time each morning hence reducing the travel and congestion costs that we see repeated in every city and town of the world. The research question then is, how can cities be utilised more creatively in order to support ubiquitous, experiential and contextualised learning and virtual collaborative learning communities? edCity is such conceptual model an early example of which was developed by Schostak (2002) in collaboration with Ken Fraser of City-plus Network: (http://www.enquirylearning.net/ELU/Issues/Information%20Technology/HKtalk4.htm ) Papert (1980:19) [START_REF] Papert | Mindstorms: children, computers and powerful ideas[END_REF] wanted children to be 'the active builders of their own intellectual structures'. He developed technology-based educational approaches to support this. The philosophies and practices of educationists from, say [START_REF] Dewey | Experience and Education[END_REF] [START_REF] Dewey | Experience and Education[END_REF] through to [START_REF] Stenhouse | An Introduction to Curriculum Research and Development[END_REF] [START_REF] Stenhouse | An Introduction to Curriculum Research and Development[END_REF], and [START_REF] Freire | Cultural Action for Freedom[END_REF] [START_REF] Freire | Cultural Action for Freedom[END_REF] have with different emphases and purposes shifted the locus from teacher to learner. The developments that have led to the rapid increase of globalised information technologies, the Internet and its varieties of communities have in many ways echoed this shift. The implications for on-line curriculum development, teaching strategies and learning strategies are farreaching. How may curricula for diversity and the intelligence communities that emerge be supported through online communication infrastructures? What communities of practice need to be facilitated in order to produce and embed the conditions for the development of creativity?

Pedagogy, creativity and the curriculum

Continuous Professional Development as a way of embedding change

Information technology and its gradual integration into the fabric of schools implies progressive innovations at a variety of levels. At a physical, architectural, level school buildings are slowly being transformed. Yet typically, when teachers think about giving lessons across a number of schools, their model is still that of the teacher at the front of the class leading a lesson, albeit using video conferencing techniques. How can we 'hack into' these traditional programmes in order to bring about new mechanisms, procedures and processes of schooling? There is now a wide acceptance among teachers that continuing professional development is required. Moreover, Action Research has been found by many schools to be a professionally acceptable way of encouraging teachers to think about and change their practices with regard to information technology. It would seem therefore that integrating CPD with whole school action research projects may be a way forward.

Action research has been employed as a vehicle for embedding and evaluating cultural change in many contexts and kinds of organisation. Somekh at MMU, for example, is currently being funded by the DfES (2003-06) to evaluate the ICT Test Bed Project. Its early results were to be published on the Becta website early in the 2004 academic year. Action research has been an important strand in this evaluation. Another project (The Pedagogy with E-Learning Resources Project), currently sponsored by the General Teaching Council for England, involves intensive action research in collaboration with four schools in Manchester and Bolton during the first two years.

Teacher-researchers and pupil-researchers from these schools will work with the university-based researchers to lead work in up to 100 further schools during the third year. These and other projects have already developed expertise at embedding action research into the implementation and evaluation of innovations in the context of einitiatives. Such approaches need to be drawn more systematically into the whole project of bringing about the next generation of schooling integrated into on-line systems that have the kind of infrastructure described in 3 above (c.f. [START_REF] Niemi | Towards a Learning Society in Finland: information and communications technology in teacher education[END_REF] Niemi 2003. This level of innovation based on leading edge broadband infrastructures (where gigabits/sec not megabits/sec are the connection rates available) has still not yet been tried despite the technologies having been commercially available for several years

Cultural paradigms

There are features of the Internet and its online communities which indicate the emergence of new cultural paradigms that are based on horizontal networks of association, peer-to-peer, point-to-point flows of information and communication that are neither time nor place dependent. The emergent feature of these networks is that they are self-organising rather than hierarchically designed and controlled. It is at the stage when the infrastructure impacts across communities and includes organisations other than schools (in the private, public and voluntary sectors) that the innovative aspects of the new technologies are most likely to be felt. A key research question is how they are to be integrated and managed and what will be the impact on schooling? This question will become all the more urgent as the kinds of infrastructure described below are embedded in national and international life with cultures forming on the basis of the kinds of connectivity that they sustain across time and place.

The blurring of boundaries between school, home and their communities in the creation of the multiverses of edCity

The blurring of boundaries has already been raised as between school, home and other institutions. However boundaries, geographically as well as in time, are erased. Within this context, the edCity project is directed at the creation of an advanced learning networked environment. edCity is a multiverse in the sense that it sustains the learning activities of individuals working alone, as well as a multiplicity of learning communities that emerge, evolve, exist for a time and then 'disappear' -to be replaced by other emergent communities of learning interest and activity. Like the games universes that create changing worlds within which players explore and are challenged, edCity is capable of drawing upon the information of cities to 'populate' the educational worlds of interest that learners define. Through semi-intelligent agents, it is able to draw upon available content, courses and course building tools to provide an environment populated with virtual 'intelligent' helpers, connecting with other people with similar interests as well as with those who provide pedagogic services. This infrastructure will naturally lead to evolving 'learning communities' that work within selected and customised learning environments. A given learning environment is capable of providing a range of learning tools, responding to particular learning styles, needs and interests. The learning environment that is generated itself 'learns' to adapt itself to the particular needs and interests of the learner.

Problem solving and workplace learning

Over the last decade, problem solving approaches to professional education and training have increased in popularity. In particular, edCity is conceived to be appropriate to workplace-based training and curricula which focus on the immediate or 'just in time' learning needs of professionals at every level in their careers from novice to expert (e.g., [START_REF] Phillips | Practice and Assessment in Nursing and Midwifery: doing it for real[END_REF], Phillips et al 2000).

edCity -Technology

This section identifies the logical and material infrastructures necessary to support the educational paradigm shift.

The central Operational Objective is the implementation and demonstration of an advanced learning framework [the New Learning Environment -"edCity"] with content resources spanning a range of topics, deployed in two or more Cities/Regions.

To meet the research, scientific and technological objectives of being anywhere, anytime, for anyone, the vision must be supported with appropriate networked communications services to enable mobility and portability.

The project does not simply equate "learning" with "access to knowledge" but, to attain the learning vision of edCity, access and knowledge are indeed the key issues: knowledge is famously unstructured and hence "difficult" -that is to say that it is hard work. The issue, then is "How far it is possible to manage the knowledge, relating resource retrieval dynamically to the learner's profile?" access is not simply an open door -there is [generally] a corridor [or several] to be followed. The issues here are to navigate the labyrinth, to provide some keys and to present the required resources in an accessible form. edCity addresses these issues using a set of advanced techniques: Knowledge management using semantic web [ontology] technologies:

Acquisition: "harvesting" data, including re-use of existing ["legacy"] content Retrieval: intelligent selection of the harvested content Knowledge access via two vectors:

Physical: High-performance multiservice networking and presentation -direct fibre, cable, high-speed DSL, broadband wireless, free-space photonics, microwave links and a range of next-generation terminals;

Virtual: The New Learning Environment -"edCity" draws on interactive gaming and "virtual mall" techniques to re-conceptualise the learning space. The functional requirements identified above lead directly to the research agenda:

Knowledge To facilitate the specific RTD actions below, it will be necessary for the RTD partners to conduct a rapid but thorough review of a number of relevant technologies, to evaluate their relevance to PLURAL and to recommend their adoption, rejection or enhancement.

Specifically, at least the following will be analysed: DAML OWL Dublin Core Metadata RDF and RDFS MPEG7, MPEG21 WARM OIL XOL OKBC The edCity implementation task will require the marrying of multi-agent simulation techniques [e.g. Swarm] to the ontology-driven applications. This in turn will require the deployment of an agent expression language [e.g. DAML]. edCity execution will require advanced user session management [e.g. Cocoon, JSP]. The Knowledge Technology review will yield specific recommendations concerning Standards and Tools.

Knowledge harvesting and retrieval and course building

The ontology techniques which characterise the semantic web vision have to be applied both to new and to "legacy" content.

Actual application of proposals like OIL, RDFS, OKBC and XOL to real content will inevitably raise significant functionality issues [see, for example, http://www.tzi.de/~heiner/public/ECAI-00ws.pdf] and extensions to these proposals will be required, generating contributions to actual or emergent standards. Resolution of the anticipated functionality problems will almost certainly require development of [START_REF]ELeGI website[END_REF] "purist" tools to process new content and [START_REF] Dewey | Experience and Education[END_REF] "realist" tools to refine existing RDFS/metadata. This activity will yield a set of harvesting and course-builder tools.

Physical access: communications and devices

It will be a pre-condition for operation of the edCity environment that high-performance, multiservice networks exist to support the end-users. Some of the envisaged scenarios are likely to require communications services to end-users at better than 10 Mbits/sec [i.e. better than fast Ethernet speeds] so typical current "consumer" end-user services [e.g. xDSL, cable, satellite] will not suffice. Against this requirement, currently, fibre-to-the-building and fixed broadband wireless are candidate technologies for discrete sites and free-space photonics is a potentially mould-breaking, emergent technology. Within building or campus-scale groups, available LAN and WLAN technologies should suffice, provided that the upstream bandwidth is adequate for the aggregated demand.

At the service level, it will be highly desirable, at least for some of the scenarios, that the end-user experience comprise seamlessly integrated data, streaming video and streaming audio channels. "Everything-over-IP" may not be an optimal solution here, although commercial and procurement issues may constrain deployment in this context. When [and only when] these demanding "terminal" requirements have been specified, it will be advantageous to involve major vendors in this sector [e.g. Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola, Sony], in the post-project exploitation stage.

In the "IP" area, the design will ensure implementation over IPv6, noting in particular the impact of muchimproved multicast capability.

Truly ubiquitous access will require that versions of edCity be operable on a wide range of device types -not merely standard PCs or Macs. Notably, support should be available for handheld devices [Personal Digital Assistants and their successors] and progressively more sophisticated cellphone/mobile devices, as well as evolved interactive TV [iTV] systems.

It may be difficult, in terms of time, commitment and budget, to realise the full stack of services which should be available to support the target scenarios and end-user systems. In one case, however, this may be possible, since a new community-scale network is emergent in Norwich, Norfolk [UK Eastern region]. This activity will yield specifications for multiple solutions capable of supporting edCity usage.

technologies Knowledge harvesting and retrieval and course building Physical access: communications and devices Virtual access: the New Learning Environment, "edCity" 4.1 Knowledge technologies "

  The vision of the Semantic Web aims at creating a Web where information can be "understood" by machines as well as by humans" [http://www.ontoknowledge.org/oil -the OIL initiative was funded under the On-To-Knowledge project (IST-1999-1013) and IBROW(IST-1999-19005)].

Virtual access: the New Learning Environment, "edCity"

The most visible project outcome will be a New Learning Environment -"edCity". The detailed design of edCity will be determined largely by the iterative "Scenarios" effort but it is evident that it will draw heavily on commercial "games" experience, including simulation, virtual reality [VR] and avatar techniques. This activity will yield first a prototype edCity product and subsequently one or more enhanced versions based on deployment experience.


G Wills

L Gilbert

Q Gee

H C Davis

T Miles-Board

D Millard

L Carr

W Hall

S Grange

A Grid Services Implementation for a Virtual Research Environment

Keywords: Virtual Research Environments, Web services, Grid Services

In the past, virtual learning and research environments have typically been implemented as monolithic systems. Current research focuses on creating such environments from selected Grid and Web services. In this paper we describe the Virtual Orthopaedic European University, which was created to support Higher Surgical Trainees to provide evidence for their learning contracts by carrying out experiments and publishing the results. We use this environment as a case study for the reimplementation of this system as a set of Web services, and we discuss the advantages of taking such an approach.

INTRODUCTION

The current vision for the Grid focuses only upon the immediate aspects of e-science: the experiments, analyses and meetings which occur over the duration of a project. As well as these synchronic aspects, any scientific effort (and e-scientific efforts in particular) will have diachronic features. These are collaborative activities extending through time, enabling the influence of the project to carry on beyond its funded timescale and disseminating its knowledge beyond the boundaries of the original collaboration. These activities are a well-known part of the scientist's profession (publishing papers, publishing data, re-running experiments and checking others' results, comparing approaches from different projects, generalising or specialising the work of others, and teaching). The current deployment of Web technologies increases the effectiveness of this loosely-coupled collaboration and the role of the digital library is to focus the various channels (archives, publishers' Websites, and aggregation agents) into a single portal which mediates these strands of diachronic collaboration. There is also a looser coupling that exists between researchers-as-educators and their students, particularly in the context of higher education. The accepted picture of e-science could be enlarged (see Figure 1) from its current focus on experimentation and analysis to feature these processes of wider significance, since without these aspects of diachronic collaboration there would be no ongoing science and, indeed, no scientists. Marchionini and Maurer [START_REF] Marchionini | The roles of digital libraries in teaching and learning[END_REF], in their proposed future of digital libraries, envisaged the sharing of resources becoming an important factor in supporting teaching; this includes the ability to share raw scientific data and other datasets. Many e-science projects have collected a vast amount of data. If the next generation of scientists is to go beyond the present position it is essential that they have access to the raw data in their research and training. These early visions are slowly being realised, for example McGrath et al. have developed a system that will locate, browse and retrieve astronomy data across several databases [START_REF] Mcgrath | Digital library technology for locating and accessing scientific data[END_REF], but there is still a need for those that have the technology skills, and librarians, and users, to work together to provide appropriate tools for handling, manipulating and analysing these large datasets [START_REF] Nevill-Manning | The biological digital library[END_REF]. There are projects beginning to do this; for example the Digital Library for Earth Science Education (DLESE) project allows students to explore geospatial materials and Earth data sets. Groups of students can then manually create reports using this data, and discuss them [START_REF] Marlino | The digital library for earth system education: building community, building the library[END_REF]. Weatherley et al. have proposed a model that will aid reviewers in reviewing complex material or a digital collection [START_REF] Weatherley | Partnership reviewing: a cooperative approach for peer review of complex educational resources[END_REF]. The peer review of collections and peer comment is a significant part of the dissemination process, which adds value to any collection. Lyon sees the digital library, in the context of an information grid, as consisting of a collection of resources for learning and teaching, data repositories for research purposes, or as archives of diverse cultural heritage materials [START_REF] Lyon | Emerging information architectures for distributed digital libraries[END_REF]. While this is only a proposed scenario, Lyon recognises the need for researchers to undertake experiments, deposit raw data, and produce pre-prints using web services. Recent advances in Web technologies allow such concepts to be realised. The Virtual Research Environment (VRE) has been implemented as a Web-based environment for supporting a critical subset of the e-science cycle (Figure 1): the collation and analysis of experimental results, the organisation of internal project discussions, and the production of appropriate outline documents depending on the requirements of conferences and journals selected for dissemination. This paper reports on a Virtual Research Environment used in the education of surgeons. The paper first describes a system built as a tightly integrated component of the Virtual Orthopaedic European University (VOEU). The paper then presents the current work in redeveloping the VRE as Grid/Web services. The paper concludes by discussing the potential impact of such systems and future work.

THE VOEU APPROACH

The Virtual Orthopaedic University provides an infrastructure for clinicians to manage the administrative, research and educational workload of the university within the digital domain. The VOEU system included the following components, the last two being the focus of this paper.

•

Multimedia Educational Modules, which provide the declarative (factual) base of material for the education of the users [START_REF] Conole | Building a Virtual University for Orthopaedics[END_REF].

•

A Virtual Classroom environment for exchange of views, and monitoring of progress [START_REF] Wills | Ontological Driven Learning Agreements[END_REF].

•

Novel Modalities of Simulation [START_REF] Grange | Networking virtual reality for shoulder arthroscopy[END_REF][START_REF] Grange | Exeter Virtual Worlds Shoulder Arthroscopy Simulator[END_REF] for the emulation of surgical procedures for training and experimentation, focusing upon micro-surgery.

•

A Virtual Observatory for the collection of data from simulation systems and the actual intra-operative data collection.

•

A Virtual Research Environment will allow Higher Surgical Trainees (HSTs) and tutors to analyse data from existing journals, investigate hypotheses, comment on reviewed articles, and even prepare and submit articles for review.

The VRE is a web-based archive of medical and technical material, which is peer-reviewed. In addition, tutors will be able to capitalise on these reviews by including the corresponding declarative and procedural knowledge in the educational modules. The implementation enables users to communicate using material tailored for their specific needs, which allows the presentation of media to be adaptive to the user experience and knowledge base. This combines declarative (factual) content with feedback from a clinical (procedural) case-based training and evaluation environment.

Combining the above disciplines within one working environment, the virtual university infrastructure [START_REF] Hazemi | Reinventing the Academy[END_REF] aims to meet the needs of clinicians by combining clinical, educational and research duties. The project builds on current thinking in educational research on pedagogy in terms of learning being situated and authentic, with learners adopting an active and constructive approach. In particular it builds on the problem-based learning literature [START_REF] O'dowd | An audit of university education in trauma and orthopaedic surgery in Great Britain[END_REF], constructivism [START_REF] Papert | Mindstorm[END_REF][START_REF] Piaget | The construction of reality in the child[END_REF], communities of practice [START_REF] Wenger | Communities of practice -learning, meaning and identity[END_REF], situated learning [START_REF] Conole | Building a Virtual University for Orthopaedics[END_REF][START_REF] Suchman | Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human/Machine Communication[END_REF][START_REF] Lave | Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation[END_REF] and activity theory [START_REF] Elegi | European learning Grid Infrastructure Project[END_REF].

The end users for this VRE will be the Higher Surgical Trainees, who are qualified surgeons training to be consultants. They are not computer specialists, their study is work based, and they are rarely co-located with other HSTs. During the six years of training they usually move post twelve times, and they have to keep a logbook (e-Portfolio). Therefore they typify both the average scientist trying to collaborate on a project, and a group of e-learners studying in a collaborative partner institution, i.e. they require tools that are easy to use for non-

VIRTUAL RESEARCH ENVIRONMENT

The Virtual Research Environment in the VOEU project had two main functions: to support the educational process and to aid surgeons in preparing findings for publication. Orthopaedic surgical trials typically run for extended periods (up to 2 years), with postoperative assessment results being collected regularly. The collated results are then analysed and discussed by a team of surgeons before being disseminated to the wider orthopaedic community, see Figure 2.

SCHEMA SPACE

The schema space is the mechanism by which the Virtual Research Environment is configured to a particular elearning community, through the formal specification of e-experimentation procedures relevant to that community. This configuration is currently achieved using three different types of schema.

• Data schemas describe the exact nature of the experimental data (for example, specification of variable names, types, and possible values). In VOEU there are a number of data schemas for collecting orthopaedic clinical trial data.

•

Experiment schemas describe experimental procedures or protocols. For example, a protocol could specify that any e-scientist conducting an experiment of type X needs to record an experiment description, statement of purpose and an outcome hypothesis. Human-readable guidelines are also included, to help HSTs meet the requirements of the protocol and to help reviewers to ensure that the requirements have been met. As a simple example, the HST guidelines for the experiment description may state "summarise the content of the experiment", whereas the reviewer guidelines ask "does the experiment description adequately summarise the content of the experiment?" • Publication schemas describe the required format for submitting experimental results to relevant journals/conferences (for example: Abstract, Introduction, Background, Experimental Methods, Results, and Conclusions). As with experiment schemas, human-readable guidelines are also included in publication schemas.

In VOEU there are currently two publication schemas presenting the submission formats for the Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery (JBJS) and the British Medical Journal (BMJ). Where possible, the publication schema also describes any mappings between the experiment protocol (for example, specifying that the experiment hypothesis should appear in the Experimental Methods section of the article). This allows outline preprint 'previews' to be generated automatically without requiring the HST to copy and paste information between protocol and preprint.

USER SPACE

The user space is where the HST uses the schema space to organise practical data entry and collation, eexperimentation, and dissemination. The user space is further subdivided into three personalised areas My Logbook, My Experiments, and My Papers. My Logbook or e-portfolio is an experiment logbook, in which experimental results can be entered (in accordance with a selected data schema). Logbook entries are subsequently added to the Virtual Research Environment community database, making data available (anonymously) to other community members.

FIGURE 2 WORKFLOW IN THE VRE

My Experiments is a workspace for e-experiments, which the e-scientist works on. An e-scientist may be involved in an experiment in the capacity of lead investigator (initiates the experiment and acts as co-ordinator and contact for the duration of the experiment), associate investigator (assistant), or reviewer (monitors the progress of the experiment and reviews its outcomes according to guidelines). Reviewers have read-only access to the experiment protocol and set-up. When a new experiment is initiated, a discussion facility is automatically set up to facilitate and record communication between the e-scientists involved. This is also the means by which reviewers can give feedback to the practitioners.

EXAMPLE OF USE

To illustrate how a HST may use the VRE, this section outlines the process of managing e-experiments from the perspective of a fictional trainee surgeon, Sam. In Sam's view of the VRE user space, Sam is shown to be currently working on three trials, undertaking a different role in each. Sam is the co-investigator in the "charcot joints" trial, is writing a systematic review of experiments in the "rotator cuff" trial, and is also a peer reviewer of the "tear size" trial. Sam has also entered several experimental records in the personal logbook (patient details, operative procedures, and assessment results), part of Sam's e-portfolio.

Formalising Trial Protocol -To initiate a new trial, Sam first selects the experiment protocol from the available experiment schemas. The VRE then uses this schema to generate a number of data entry forms into which Sam enters specifics of the experiment. Guidelines for completing these forms are presented as "stretch text links" [START_REF] Nelson | Computer Lib/Dream Machines[END_REF], which can be viewed/hidden as required. A tutor specifies the associate investigators and peer reviewers who will assist Sam on the trial. When created, the new trial will appear in Sam's VRE user space, and also in the user spaces of the associate investigators and peer reviewers.

Selecting a Dataset -To create a dataset for the new trial, Sam searches the data repository for appropriate data used in previous trials for suitable cases or uploads new cases from Sam's logbook. Since Sam has already specified the experiment schemas, only those cases matching this schema will be searched. Sam and associates subsequently add 42 different experimental results to the trial, which can be viewed in tabulated form for visual comparison.

Analysing the Dataset -To perform analyses on the dataset, Sam and associates choose from statistical methods offered by a distributed Analysis Engine. Using the experiment schemas and metadata from the Analysis Engine, the VRE tool is able to generate an entry form for each statistical method, which Sam can use to fine tune the analysis (specify test variables, groupings, etc.) The Analysis Engine queues the requested analysis and notifies Sam when the results are available. These results appear in Sam's VRE user space, and can be viewed. Discussing the Results -Having obtained some significant results from the statistical analyses, Sam then decides to create a pre-print for discussion by the co-investigators on a discussion board created for the e-print. Sam, co-investigators, or a tutor, can specify who is able to see the pre-print and comment on it. For the trial, the pre-print can be taken on to publication. In this case Sam selects the JBJS publication schema, and the VRE toolkit generates a pre-print template using the information Sam entered in the trial protocol. Sam fleshes out this template, following the JBJS guidelines provided, and specifies which analysis results should be included in the preprint. After previewing the pre-print, Sam submits it; behind the scenes the VRE tool submits the pre-print and its associated metadata to the community e-prints server (where it subsequently becomes available to the members of community), and makes the paper available in the user space of Sam and associates.

GRID SERVICES FOR A VRE

The VOEU project is based on an integrated and tightly coupled architecture, making it difficult to expand as the user requirements change. The follow-up project to VOEU is the Collaborative Orthopaedic Research Environment (CORE) This takes as its foundations the VRE established in VOEU, but develops the modules into services within a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) [START_REF] Smythe | Basic Architectural Principles for Learning Technology Systems[END_REF]0]. The aim of CORE is to provide integrated computer support across the research and education cycles. For surgeons these activities are part of their Continuing Professional Development. Surgeons undertake research and publish papers to achieve goals according to the learning contracts that they have with their Professional organisations. These activities constitute a critical subset of the e-science cycle (Figure 1): the collation and analysis of experimental results, the organisation of internal project discussions, and the production of appropriate outline documents depending upon the requirements of conferences and journals selected for dissemination.

The CORE project will develop a VRE demonstrator based on a SOA for supporting all of these activities. The advantages of using a SOA are:

FIGURE 3 OVERVIEW OF THE PROPOSED INFRASTRUCTURE

• Modularity: As appropriate services are dynamically coupled, it is relatively easy to integrate new services into the framework.

•

Interoperability: Due to standardisation of the communication and description of the services, third party services can easily be incorporated into the VRE as required.

•

Extensibility: Due to the relative ease with which services can be incorporated into the VRE, there is less danger of technology 'lock-in'.

The CORE project is being implemented as a toolkit of generic components based on the Grid SOA infrastructure. Figure 3 illustrates the CORE Framework concept, in the context of an e-science community Web site and integrated Grid services. Grid services were originally conceived as a method of distributing high performance computation, and it is true that the Grid will enable researchers and learners to run simulation and data analysis on a scale not possible today. However, Grid services also provide benefits in the areas of distributed knowledge and information management, offering functionality that is essential for serious e-learning applications, such as security and state awareness.

The Semantic Grid, using Semantic Web technologies to describe Grid services, promises further benefits in the areas of automation and organisation. For example, it may be possible to automate a feasibility check of possible trials by looking at the availability of appropriate resources, including lab time, experimental datasets and staff.

In an extended Grid environment, such as that described by the European e-Learning Grid infrastructure (ELeGI) project [START_REF] Elegi | European learning Grid Infrastructure Project[END_REF] it would be possible to search for and utilise alternative services and resources on the wider Grid. This is not only more robust, but offers the exciting possibility of new services being automatically incorporated into the local learning environment and new communities of remote studiers and teachers evolving naturally. CORE is less ambitious in the short term, but still seeks to exploit this flexibility and dynamism. The focus of the generic toolkit components in CORE will be a Virtual Bone Biology Laboratory, incorporating the basic science disciplines of molecular and tissue biology, pharmacology, prosthetics, trials management, and the clinical disciplines concentrating on musculoskeletal applications in rheumatology and orthopaedics.

The CORE Bone Laboratory will provide a post-graduate training experience for researchers and clinicians with a background in bioengineering, initially treating musculoskeletal problems, with emphasis on training the next generation of clinicians and scientists. The CORE will need to provide Grid services for the simulation and modelling of bone and soft tissue biology, analysis of large scale experiments and the modelling of nanometric tissue units. The use of the Grid for distributed computation means that powerful analysis and modelling tools can be made available to students. The Bone Laboratory also aims to be a testbed resource for scientists developing new technologies for information management, and constructing technologies on the nanometric scale. This will rely on the flexibility of the SOA and the secure accessibility of the Grid.

CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK

The development of a Virtual Orthopaedic European University described in this paper is underpinned by a pedagogical approach built on current education research. This paper has focused on a specific framework, the Virtual Research Environment, which supports the development and dissemination of documents by assisting authors in collating and analysing experimental results, organising internal project discussions, and producing papers.

The system provides a distributed architecture for institutions to manage multiple centres, advancing surgical standards through education and research. The tools are generic, and applicable across surgical and medical training. The system has been deployed in a local hospital and HSTs validated the trials. With the advent of virtual infrastructures, there is the possibility of managing most of the administrative, research and educational workload of the university within the digital domain. This has potentially huge benefits for surgeons, providing greater access to information without the friction associated with traditional infrastructures. The CORE project is taking the VOEU VRE and decoupling the processes by using a SOA and Web services. It will further allow the development of Grid services to support the virtual experiments on Tissue Growth in a virtual Bone Laboratory. CORE will enable HSTs to collect and analyse experimental results from their own or other people's experiments, organise internal project discussions, and produce appropriate documents. The project should have a major impact on a number of areas which include:

FIGURE 1 COMPLETE

 1 FIGURE 1 COMPLETE CYCLE OF E-SCIENCE

  • being able to keep track of the research administration: trial protocol, ethical approval, and workflow as the trial progresses • enabling access to research data from various trials and in formats that allow analysis of the data • allowing easier meta-analysis or thematic reviews • monitoring the effectiveness of surgical interventions • enabling a consortium to write appropriate documents for dissemination (medical reports, journal articles, etc.) • producing up to date learning and teaching material

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Part of this work was funded by The European Commission under the Virtual Orthopaedic European University project, IST-1999-13079, Information Society Technology Program.


David E Millard

Arouna Woukeu

Barry Tao

Hugh C Davis

Experiences with Writing Grid Clients for Mobile devices

This paper describes our attempts to write GRID clients for Mobile Devices, such as a PDA, which have restrictive computational and storage facilities. Our experiences are based on an implementation of a mobile GRID client for Finesse, an existing web-based e-learning system. At this stage of our work we are not looking to novel applications of mobile learning, but rather are exploring the feasibility of mobile devices as GRID platforms, with novel learning applications as our future aim. We examine Java, .NET and proxy solutions and look ahead to the next generation of WSRF-based GRID Infrastructure.

INTRODUCTION

There is a continuing trend for computing devices to become more heterogeneous, with rapid developments in the areas of ubiquitous and mobile systems [3]. This offers new opportunities for many application domains, for example in e-learning it opens up new possibilities for technology to enhance or ease the processes of learning and teaching; both by making existing tools more available (to remote or mobile participants) but also by offering the possibility of new applications that are not possible with traditional desk-top setups (for example, by enhancing field work).

Simultaneously there is a trend in the distributed computing and middleware areas of computing towards Service-Oriented-Architectures (SOA), and in particular the GRID is evolving as a SOA for securely orchestrating and sharing stateful services and resources across distributed organisations [START_REF] Foster | The Anatomy of the Grid: Enabling Scalable Virtual Organizations[END_REF]. Mobile devices will become important resource and computing platforms in the service-oriented world, but have serious limitations, in terms of computational and storage power, compared with traditional machines.

In this paper we will report on our experiences of implementing a mobile GRID client for the Finesse elearning system. This investigation is part of the ELeGI project, which aims at creating a common European GRID infrastructure. The ultimate goal of our work is to ensure that this infrastructure can support the next generation of novel e-learning applications, and the work on Finesse is an important first step in establishing the feasibility of various technical approaches to mobile GRID computing. The remainder of this paper is structured as follows: Section 2 describes why we believe mobility to be an important goal for e-learning systems. Section 3 introduces Finesse and the Finesse Grid Services (FIGS). Section 4 discusses our experience in developing a Mobile Grid Client for FIGS and describes the current support in Java and .Net for mobile Grid clients, and Section 5 concludes the paper and looks ahead to the new generation of WSRF-based GRID infrastructure.

WHY MOBILITY?

Arguments about how mobility could be useful for e-learning could be categorized into two areas:

•

Mobility as increasing accessibility •

Mobility as an essential part of a learning application

The first of these arguments suggests that it is generally beneficial to both students and teachers to make learning resources more easily available, and mobile devices are one (of several) valid modes of access [START_REF] Liu | Wireless and mobile technologies to enhance teaching and learning[END_REF]. This seems to be a sound argument, and justifies our mobile Finesse prototype, but the benefits do not always match up to the costs. In particular it seems that student habits are hard to change, and that students given mobility facilities will not always use them, even if they are seemingly obvious applications such as lecture scheduling and assessment deadline notifications [START_REF] Traxler | Using personal digital assistants to support computing students[END_REF]. Perhaps this is because of the shortcomings of mobile devices as compared to desktop systems (i.e. speed, display, interfaces, etc).

The second argument concentrates on mobility enabling computers to augment an entirely separate paradigm of learning. This paradigm is not new, it includes such things as laboratory work and field trips, but it is rarely augmented or enabled by computing devices. For example, these mobile devices can be used instead of traditional pen and paper technology to make organizing these experiences, or collecting student information, easier [START_REF] Rieger | Using Mobile Computing to Enhance Field Study[END_REF]. But they can also be used to create novel learning experiences, such as the Ambient Wood project [START_REF] Rogers | Ambient Wood: Designing New Forms of Digital Augmentation for Learning Outdoors[END_REF], in which children were able to explore a real wood and gather data using mobile sensor technologies. They could then test their hypotheses on how the environment would change given some new parameters (such as increased rainfall), by taking new readings from the wood that were effectively from a simulation overlaid on the physical space. We believe that constructing these rich new learning applications requires the kind of software infrastructure envisaged by ELeGI. Our goal in exploring GRID technology on mobile devices is to ensure that the infrastructure is flexible enough to support such novel learning experiences.

FINESSE AND FINESSE GRID SERVICES

Finesse (Finance Education in a Scalable Software Environment) is a web-based collaborative learning and teaching environment for the finance domain developed at the University of St. Andrews [START_REF] Power | The Finesse Portfolio Management Facility[END_REF]. The system offers a variety of tools that allow students to manage on-line portfolios and buy and sell shares using real-time market data.

Figure 1 shows a screenshot (taken from the finesse.ac.uk website) of the interface for buying and selling shares. As well as this core functionality Finesse also allows students to compare and contrast their portfolios in order to give them direct experience of the various investment strategies used by investors.

As part of the ELeGI project's investigation into requirements for an e-learning GRID infrastructure work was undertaken at St. Andrews to create a set of GRID services that replicated the functionality of the original Finesse system. This resulted in the Finesse Grid Services (FIGS), which is composed of five Grid Services: The project partners decided that to adequately test FIGS it would be necessary to work on independent client interfaces. St. Andrews developed a reference console client and also a web version that reuses the original interface (shown in Figure 1).

At Southampton, due to our interest in mobile clients, we decided to work on a mobile client interface that would make the portfolios accessible via a PDA. While this is advantageous in itself (as Finesse is all about making the simulation widely accessible, and interaction with the system is time-dependant as share prices rise and fall) it does not constitute a novel mobile learning application as we have defined them in Section 2.

Although our long term goal is to ensure that the GRID infrastructure developed by ELeGI is broad enough to support the next generation of mobile and ubiquitous learning applications, we felt that the exercise with Finesse was a crucial mile stone in achieving this.

In the next section we detail the various ways in which we have tried to get GRID clients to run on a PDA device.

FIGURE 1:

The Finesse Web Interface for Buying and Selling Shares (from finesse.ac.uk)

A FIGS MOBILE CLIENT

In developing Mobile Grid clients for the Finesse Grid Services, we have investigated three main approaches:

• Java-based Grid clients • .Net-based Grid clients • Proxy-based Grid clients
In this section we first introduce the key technologies of the Grid and then look at the benefits of a Grid approach for mobile devices. We then present the three implementation options that we have explored.

GRID Technologies

The Open Grid Service Architecture (OGSA) is a standards-based definition of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for the Grid. The Open Grid Service Infrastructure (OGSI) is the base infrastructure specification for OGSA [START_REF]Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI), Version 1.0[END_REF]. OGSI defines a set of Web Service Definition Language (WSDL) specifications for interfaces, behaviours and schema that fulfil OGSA [3]. It specifies mechanisms for creating, naming, managing, monitoring, grouping and sharing information among Grid Services. WSRF [START_REF]The WS-Resource Framework[END_REF] is a refactoring of the OGSI that is fully based on Web Services. It defines a generic and open framework for modelling and accessing stateful resources. Not all of the WSRF services are fully defined and it is very much an evolving standard.

There are several implementations of the OGSI specification for different environments and platforms including the popular Globus Toolkit for Java [START_REF] Sandholm | Globus Toolkit3 Core -A Grid Service Container Framework[END_REF], and OGSI.NET [START_REF] Wasson | NET: OGSI-compliance on the .NET Framework[END_REF]

Mobile Grid Computing

Mobile Grid computing is about making Grid Services available and accessible anytime anywhere from Mobile Devices. A number of research efforts have investigated this domain and highlighted both advantages and limitations in extending the Grid to the mobile world [START_REF] Chu | Mobile OGSI.NET: Grid Computing on Mobile Devices[END_REF]13,[START_REF] Bhagyavati | Wireless Grid Enables Ubiquitous Computing[END_REF]. Wireless mobile devices are generally characterised by several limitations and constraints. The processing power is low in most of these devices (maybe with the exception of laptops), the built-in memory is low and the storage capacity is very limited compared to desktops despite the use of external memory cards by some devices. The battery life is short and display facilities are also very restricted in size and quality. Due to mobility the network is unstable (intermittent connectivity and poor bandwidth). These limitations make mobile devices a platform that would benefit from the Grid. The main advantages of mobile Grid computing include mobile-to-mobile and mobile-to-desktop collaboration for resource sharing, improving user experience, convenience and contextual relevance and novel application scenarios. A grid-based mobile environment would allow mobile devices to become more efficient by offloading resource-demanding work to more powerful devices or computers.

Java for Mobile Devices

The Finesse Grid Services are developed and deployed on Globus Toolkit (GT3.2) which is a Java-based environment; therefore Java for mobile devices appeared as a natural starting point for our investigation. We tried several mobile JVMs (Java Virtual Machine) on our IPAQ PPC looking for one that could support a minimum set of APIs to invoke GT3.2 Grid services. In this process, we looked at the following JVMs for mobile devices: EWE VM [START_REF]Ewe Virtual Machine[END_REF] is a free and open source Java-based VM for mobile devices (mainly PDAs). It comes with an SDK (Ewe SDK) and provides support for advanced features such as Infra-red, Synchronisation, Swing or applets but its API's compatibility is limited to Java 1.1 and 1.2 as well as the discontinued Personal Java. This compatibility issue made it impossible for us to use the Ewe VM. Cre-ME and CrEme are two Java-based virtual machines from NSICOM [START_REF]Cre-ME and CrEme Java-based virtual machines[END_REF]. The Cre-ME 4.0 VM is compatible with the J2ME Connected Device Configuration (CDC) 1.0 which is based on JDK 1.3.1; whereas CrEme 3.25 is compliant with Sun's Personal Java, mainly based on JDK 1.1.8. These two virtual machines are based on two separate subsets of Java, neither of which supported enough of the Java API to run a Globus client.

IBM J9 VM is another mobile Java-based virtual machine. This JVM was used as part of WebSphere Studio Device Developer (WSDD), an IBM Integrated Development Environment for mobile devices using J2ME (Java 2 Micro edition). IBM J9 which supports J2ME (CDC & CLDC, MIDP & Personal Profile), the official cut down version of Suns Java. Unfortunately J"ME is very limited and was again unsuitable for our development needs. SuperWaba VM [START_REF] Superwaba | The real Power of Mobile Computing[END_REF] is another Java-based VM for mobile devices (PDAs and smart phones). It is part of the SuperWaba open source platform which defines a language, a virtual machine, a class file format and a set of basic classes. It has an active community and developers can use common Java IDEs, however it does not implement the standard Java specification and its API does not support Java packages. Therefore SuperWaba could also not be used in our exercise to develop a mobile Figs clients.

In the end none of these virtual machines could support client APIs to invoke the FIGS directly from our Pocket PDA because they are all running some cut down version of the Java API. We have therefore concluded that at the moment there is also no Java-based OGSI implementation for mobile devices.

Proxy-based Grid Client

Having unsuccessfully explored the two previous options, we were left with a proxy-based Grid client as the best option taking into account resource and network limitations on mobile devices. This is disappointing as the loosely coupled architecture of Grid Services seems ideal for mobile devices that often change their networks and neighbours. A Proxy solution relies on a connection back to a trusted server, and while Grid services can be invoked this way, it looses much of the flexibility and dynamism of a genuine mobile Grid client. Figure 3 shows the web proxy viewed on a mobile device, in this case a PocketPC based PDA.

CONCLUSION

In this paper we have detailed the justifications for pursuing a mobile GRID client for the domain of elearning. We have looked at three options for a mobile GRID implementation:

We conclude that there is currently no OGSI Java API for mobile devices, and that OGSI.NET is inappropriate because it is not available on mobile devices (despite promising initiatives), has questionable interoperability with existing GRID systems such as GT3, and has been deprecated in favour of WSRF. We believe that in the future WSRF may improve support for GRID clients on mobile devices because it is fully web services based and has a simplified API, but a good reference implementation may take some time to emerge. Our solution is to implement a web-based proxy that uses GT3 to talk to distributed GRID services, and then makes this functionality available via a web interface specially designed for mobile devices with limited display capabilities.

FIGURE 2 :

 2 FIGURE 2: Proxy Architecture for Mobile Clients

FIGURE 3 :

 3 FIGURE 3: Web pages viewed on PDA device

  for the Microsoft .NET environment. The Globus Alliance is a research and development project with a number of academic and commercial partners that has the objective of developing a Grid infrastructure for scientific and engineering computing. The Globus Toolkit is a collection of services, written in Java, which can be used to deploy and discover other services. Microsoft's .NET environment is a development framework that enables people to build service oriented software solutions. .NET is common across all new Microsoft platforms and has bindings to several languages, including C# and Visual Basic. The OGSI.NET implementation is a container framework that allows .Net applications to access Grid Services. The Grid community is currently in a transition period between OGSI and WSRF, and this is reflected in the ongoing development of Grid infrastructure and tools. Mobile OGSI.NET is an effort to develop a cut-down version of OGSI.NET tailored to mobiles devices running the .NET Compact Framework (mainly Pocket PCs). OGSI.NET is discontinued and has been replaced by WSRF.NET[START_REF] Humphrey | Architectural Foundations of WSRF[END_REF] which is an initial implementation of WSRF on .NET. The next release of the Globus Toolkit (version 4) will also attempt to be WSRF compatible. OGSI::Lite[START_REF] Ogsi | Lite and WSRF::Lite -An Implementation of the Web Services Resource Framework[END_REF] (an experiment in developing a Perl implementation of OGSI) is now superseded by WSRF::Lite, which is a Perl implementation of the current WSRF definition. Other Grid frameworks have been conceived with WSRF in mind. OMII_1[17] is an open source, robust and secure Web services platform for building Grid applications, which already supports the most stable elements of the WSRF standard . It is developed by the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute at the University of Southampton, UK.

Table 1

 1 summarises the compatibility specifications for each of the JVMs.

		JVM Compatibility
	EWE VM	Java 1.1,
		Java1.2,
		Personal Java
	Cre-ME	J2ME CDC 1.0
	CeEme	Personal Java,
		JDK 1.1.8
	SuperWaba JDK 1.1+
	IBM J9	J2ME

TABLE 1 :

 1 Mobile JVM compatibility4.4 Mobile OGSI.NETWe also investigated the use of Microsoft .NET Compact Framework and looked at Mobile OGSI.NET[START_REF] Chu | Mobile OGSI.NET: Grid Computing on Mobile Devices[END_REF] which is an implementation of the OGSI.NET implementation for mobile devices. It is built on top of Microsoft .NET Compact Framework and based on the Pocket PC 2003 or Windows Mobile operating system. It has a three-layer architecture with a Mobile Web Server for handling endpoint-to-endpoint communication, a Grid Services Module for message parsing and multiplexing, and a Grid Service dealing with application logic and processing. The aim is to bring the benefits of Grid computing to mobile users while addressing resource limitations and intermittent network connectivity. While Mobile OGSI.NET emerged as the only real attempt to provide an OGSI implementation for mobile devices, we could not further our investigation into potential interoperability issues with GT3.2 because the tool itself is no longer supported and is no longer generally available for download.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors would like to thank Colin Allison at the University of St. Andrews and his team for supporting the FIGS prototyping work described in this paper.


Angelo Gaeta
email: agaeta@crmpa.unisa.it

Pierluigi Ritrovato
email: ritrovato@crmpa.unisa.it

Matteo Gaeta
email: gaeta@unisa.it

Towards a Domain Specific Application Development Environment for the ELeGI architecture: the Software Factories approach

The Next Generation Grids (NGG) expert group has pioneered the vision of "Invisible Grid" whereby the complexity of Grid systems and architectures is hidden to both developers and users. In this new vision, the Grid has a different role: it will not more provide a virtual computing environment but it will be the basis of a more complex service oriented, knowledge-based and collaborative environment suitable for the specific domains in which citizen and organizations have to operate. Grid community main effort is still related to definition and creation of middleware upon which the development of Grid architectures and applications remains a straight difficult task that can be done only by expert researchers and developers. This is a factor, among other ones, that will prevent the fulfilment of this vision. In this paper we try to contribute to a challenging research topic: how can we easy develop applications for Grid architectures and environment? To this aim, we will show an approach to the creation of development environment for Grid applications and we will see how our approach affects

the ELeGI software architecture.

INTRODUCTION

Since from its early days, the Grid computing [START_REF] Foster | The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure[END_REF] has raised many expectations in both industrial and academic communities that immediately identified the benefits and advantages of using Grid technologies. The computational paradigm proposed by the Grid went beyond the classical distributed computing paradigm. Foster et al. [START_REF] Foster | The anatomy of the Grid: Enabling scalable virtual organizations[END_REF] present the specific problem that underlies the Grid concepts as coordinated resource sharing and problem solving in dynamic, multi-institutional Virtual Organizations (VO) where the distinctive features with respect to the other distributed computational paradigm was the VO concept. In those days Grid development of middleware and applications was driven by the increasingly request of computing power from the science community The issues of definition and development of Grid middleware and applications are being studied by researchers since from the beginning and a good survey about Grid technologies, middleware, applications and world wide projects was provided by Baker, Buyya, and Laforenza in [START_REF] Baker | Grids and Grid Technologies for Wide-Area Distributed Computing[END_REF] that concluded outlining that "It is difficult to predict the future in a field such as information technology where the technological advances are moving very fast. Hence, it is not an easy task to forecast what will become the 'dominant' Grid approach. Windows of opportunity for ideas and products seem to open and close in the seeming 'blink of the eye'". They were right. Grid paradigm is evolved and the major milestone of its evolution is the definition of the Open Grid Service Architecture (OGSA) [START_REF] Foster | The Physiology of the Grid: An Open Grid Service Architecture for Distributed System Integration[END_REF] marked by the adoption of a service oriented approach in designing Grid architectures. Integrating Grid technologies and Web Service ones, the Grid community aims to promote a wide adoption of Grid technologies in both e-business and e-science domains trying to move Grid form a niche technology to a commodity one. The key concepts of OGSA together with the raising of the Semantic Web vision [START_REF] Berners-Lee | The Semantic Web[END_REF] and its related technologies have provided new exiting challenges and new research priorities. In [START_REF]workshops concerning Emerging Knowledge Infrastructures, Technologies and Applications[END_REF] it is established a vision of a "Grid-enabled, seamless, collaborative knowledge and services environment for all" in which "the role of the Grid will change from providing a virtual computing environment to being the basis of a knowledge fertilisation and communication environment". The Grid 'dominant' approach today seems to be the socalled "Grid for all" moving beyond computing-on-demand model towards a model integrating semantic and knowledge technologies, characterised by domain verticalisation (Grid domain specific) through the definition of specific services, development environment tailored on the domain need and inter-grid interoperability and widely adoption in specialized domains. The European Learning Grid Infrastructure (ELeGI) project [START_REF] Gaeta | ELeGI: The European Learning Grid Infrastructure[END_REF], since its conception, has foreseen this "Grid for all" vision. Through the adoption of a service-oriented model that is deeply intertwined with the use of semantic tagging, and it is aligned with the global community developing trends such as OGSA, the Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF) [START_REF] Foster | The WS-Resource Framework[END_REF] and the Next Generation Grid (NGG) [3] [4], ELeGI aims to define and design a Grid software architecture in order to provide a specific verticalizion for the e-Learning domain.

In order to fulfil this challenging vision, there are many research issues to solve. The one we try to address in this paper is concerned with the definition of Domain Specific Languages, tools and development environments that have to hide Grid complexity and simplify the development of applications in the e-Learning domain. To this aim, we propose a methodology based on the classical Domain Modelling approach, and a development environment suitable for development of Grid applications. We will argue how the proposed development environment, based on the new Microsoft Software Factories [START_REF] Greenfield | Short: Software Factories: Assembling Applications with Patterns, Frameworks, Models & Tools[END_REF] strategy for development of distributed component-based applications, will be able to capture, by exploiting some specialized Domain Specific Languages, many of the desired feature of a Grid application for the e-Learning domain. The paper is organized as follow: section 2 presents some works related to the development of Grid applications, section 3 summarizes the ELeGI strategy to progress human learning and provides an overview of its Grid software architecture, section 4 presents the software Factories approach and our proposal to adopt this approach in a Grid environment, section 5 presents the impact that our approach potentially has on the ELeGI project. Finally, we present our conclusions and future works.

RELATED WORKS

Of course, the development of Grid applications, the creation of Grid application programming environments as well as the redesign of distributed applications in order to be Grid-Aware, they are topics addressed by many research projects. For instance, among the project specialized for Grid application development, we remember the Grid Application Development Software (GrADS) project [9] and its extension Virtual Grid Application Development Software (VGrADS) [10]. Fundamentally, these project share the basis idea of the NGG that is to hide Grid complexity and allow end-user to [START_REF] Foster | The GrADS Project: Software Support for High-Level Grid Application Development[END_REF] "be able to specify applications in high-level, domain-specific problem solving languages and expect these applications to seamlessly access the Grid to find required resources when needed". One of the main results of the GrADS project is its execution framework for adaptive Grid application based on the concepts of configurable object program [START_REF] Foster | Toward a Framework for Preparing and Executing Adaptive Grid Programs[END_REF] [START_REF] Foster | The GrADS Project: Software Support for High-Level Grid Application Development[END_REF]. Another project sharing the same philosophy is the GridLab project [11] that "aims to provide fundamentally new capabilities for applications to exploit the power of Grid computing, thus bridging the gap between application needs and existing Grid middleware" and its main result is the Grid Application Toolkit (GAT) providing access to services needed by the Grid applications [START_REF] Allen | Enabling Applications on the Grid: A GridLab Overview[END_REF]. Even if they share our purpose, these projects are focalized on the computational Grid vision and they are mainly related to address issues of dynamic resource management and configuration in order to allow adaptivity and reach some desired performances especially for scientific applications. They have obtained good results, both from methodological and technical viewpoints but they can not be directly applicable to the development of Grid applications based on the "Grid for all" vision provided in [START_REF]workshops concerning Emerging Knowledge Infrastructures, Technologies and Applications[END_REF]. They lack, for instance, in providing seamless access to existing knowledge, persons and groups anytime and anywhere, and to support the creation, encapsulation and exploitation of new joint knowledge. In our effort to re-think a Grid application to fulfil the innovative role of the Grids, we think these are relevant issues that developers have to face in order to develop Grid applications, obviously together with the concepts of adaptivity and performance contracts well addressed in the aforementioned projects. A Grid programming environment is also object of study of the Grid.it project [16]. In the frame of the project, it will be investigated an "innovative programming environments that i) support the programmers in all the activities related to parallelism exploitation, by providing some kind of structured primitives for parallelism exploitation; ii) allow to achieve full interoperability with existing software, both parallel and sequential, either available in source or in object form; iii) support and enforce reuse of already developed code in other applications" [START_REF] Laforenza | Components for High-Performance Grid Programming in GRID[END_REF]. Laforenza, Vanneschi et al. in [START_REF] Laforenza | Components for High-Performance Grid Programming in GRID[END_REF] present their research studies to design and develop a Grid-Aware application programming environment based on an ASSIST, which is a structured parallel programming environment originally designed to address cluster and network of TCP/IP workstations [START_REF] Vanneschi | The programming model of ASSIST, an environment for parallel and distributed portable applications[END_REF]. In ASSIST the Grid-Aware application can be built as composition of ASSIST components and possibly other existing (legacy) components. Applications are supported by a Grid Abstract Machine including dynamic application management and all the abstractions from the resource, collective and connectivity levels of a Grid middleware. An Application Manager supports static allocation and dynamic reallocation of adaptive applications according to a performance contract, a reconfiguration strategy, and a performance model. Our approach is close to ASSIST. Like ASSIST, in fact, we propose a component based programming environment, we support reuse of already developed code and like ASSIST we rely upon an abstraction of the Grid middleware functionalities. Our abstractions are modelled using a set of Domain Specific Languages (DSL) for modelling all the features of a Grid environment (e.g. typical resource and information management as well as innovative semantic and knowledge management and specific domain verticalizations) in terms of components and interactions among them. In contrast with ASSIST our approach is not tied to structured parallelism of applications and it is neutral form this viewpoint. As we will see later (see Section 0) our application development environment can be customized on the basis of the specific DSLs adopted and, from a methodological viewpoint, we could define different distributed programming models and techniques. Talia and Lee in [START_REF] Lee | Grid Programming Models: Current Tools, Issues and Directions[END_REF] provide a dissertation about different Grid programming models and techniques and we observe that, theoretically, our development environment can be customized in order to support one or more of these programming styles. But, as we will se in the later, currently there are many practical issues, mainly due to the early state of the tools allowing the Software Factories approach, that doesn't allow this from a practical viewpoint.

TOWARDS THE SEMANTIC GRID FOR HUMAN LEARNING: THE ELEGI ARCHITECTURE

The aim of ELeGI [START_REF] Gaeta | ELeGI: The European Learning Grid Infrastructure[END_REF], the European Learning Grid Infrastructure EU funded Integrated Project, is to progress effective human learning by promoting, supporting and demonstrating a learning paradigm shift from the current information transfer paradigm, to one that focuses on the learner and on the knowledge construction using experiential and collaborative learning approaches in a contextualised, personalised and ubiquitous way. In ELeGI, the learner has an active and central role in the learning process. Learning activities are aimed at facilitating the construction of knowledge and skills in the learner, rather than the memorisation of information. Keeping the learner at the centre of the new learning processes personalisation (exploiting the existing learner's capability and skills) and individualisation (create and adapt learning paths according to learner's preferences) become relevant aspects to be supported by technologies through the creation of the right context. ELeGI will adopt a service-oriented model, which is deeply intertwined with the use of semantic tagging, aligns itself with the global community developing trends such as OGSA, WSRF and the Next Generation Grid more in general, and its research directions should look at the creation of a Semantic Grid for Human Learning: The Learning Grid. In [START_REF] Gaeta | Enabling Technologies for future learning scenarios: The Semantic Grid for Human Learning[END_REF] we have defined the Semantic Grid for Human Learning as a domain verticalization of the Semantic Grid improved with tools, services, languages, standards and technologies for the Education & Training. To create this particular instance of the Semantic Grid, we foresee: (i) adoption of IMS Learning Design (IMS-LD) specifications and ii) adoption of the Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) standard. As explained in [START_REF] Gaeta | Enabling Technologies for future learning scenarios: The Semantic Grid for Human Learning[END_REF], through IMS-LD we add a high-level support to educational models and with WSRP we enhance the low-level service model, allowing the creation of a service model dynamic, stateful and presentation-oriented. The reference architecture is the Semantic Grid architecture provided by Globe et al in [START_REF] Goble | The Semantic Grid: Myth Busting and Bridge Building[END_REF] upon which we foresee a set of semantically enriched services typical of the learning domain that we have identified in our previous works [START_REF] Capuano | How To Use GRID Technology for Building Next Generation Learning Environments[END_REF] and we have defined as IWT Grid-Aware Services. Two sets of services are identified: the Base Services providing functionalities typical of a Learning Management System and the Learning Services providing high-level functionalities for a personalized learning experience, like learning path personalization, student's model evaluation and Driver services for management and delivery of learning experiences. These last one services are WSRP complaint, so they are able to produce and aggregate GUIs. The architecture is depicted in Figure 1 For a description of the Semantic Grid for Human Learning, see [START_REF] Gaeta | Enabling Technologies for future learning scenarios: The Semantic Grid for Human Learning[END_REF]. In this context, we only emphasize that, as we will see in the next sections, our approach aims to create development environments for learning scenarios production.

THE SOFTWARE FACTORIES METHODOLOGY TO CREATE A GRID APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT

A detailed explanation of the Software Factories methodology can be found in [START_REF] Greenfield | Short: Software Factories: Assembling Applications with Patterns, Frameworks, Models & Tools[END_REF], in which a software factory is defined as "a software product line that configures extensible tools, processes, and content using a software factory template based on a software factory schema to automate the development and maintenance of variants of an archetypical product by adapting, assembling, and configuring framework-based components". According to [START_REF] Clements | Software Product Lines: Practices and Patterns[END_REF], a software product line is a set of software systems sharing a common, managed set of features that satisfy the specific needs of a particular market segment or mission and are developed from a common set of core assets in a prescribed way. The advantages and drawbacks of the software product lines are described in [START_REF] Clements | Software Product Lines: Practices and Patterns[END_REF]. The approach proposed by Microsoft is a software product line and it is based on two central elements: a software factory schema and a software factory template.

A software factory schema is a way to categorize and summarize development artifacts, such as XML documents, models, configuration files, build scripts, source code files, in an orderly way, and a way to define relationships between them, so that we can maintain consistency among them. Once defined the software factory schema, we must implement it, defining the Domain Specific Languages (DSL), patterns, frameworks, and tools it describes, packaging them, and making them available to product developers. Collectively, these assets form a software factory template. Finally, we need and extensible development environment that, when configured with a software factory template, becomes the software factory for the specific product family. The described methodology is not new and it is based on the convergence of key ideas in systematic reuse, model-driven development, and process frameworks. Much emphasis is in the central role of modelling in the software development processes and in the adoption of specialized DSLs to model specific domain for the product family. DSLs belong to the class of modelling languages and they are used to build models of a specific domain to address. At the present, there are a lot of modelling technologies relying upon modelling languages. The most famous one is the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) [START_REF] Miller | MDA Guide Version 1.0.1[END_REF] that provides a standardized approach to model driven development on the basis of platform abstractions. The purpose of MDA is to separate the design of application or business logic from the implementation platform and it makes distinction between Platform Independent Models (PIM) and Platform Specific Models (PSM). The first relies upon OMG standards including the Unified Modeling Language (UML), Meta-Object Facility (MOF), XML Meta-Data Interchange (XMI), and Common Warehouse Metamodel (CWM) in order to design a model, while the second relies upon tools to translate the PIM into a particular platform dependent implementation. The Software Factories and MDA are both methodologies to software development and are both based on the model-driven approach. What are the differences? Similarities and differences are discussed in [START_REF] Cook | Domain-Specific Modeling and Model Driver Architecture[END_REF], in which it is emphasized that the approach of using general purpose modelling languages, as the UML or the MOF, is not often a successful factor in model-driven software development. While the adoption of standards and general purpose modelling language allows portability and platform independence, mostly it is required additional effort in order to allow i) a domain customization and ii) appropriate technology mapping. Domain specificity is the key feature of DSLs. Now that we have given an overview of the Software Factories methodology, we have to justify our proposal to adopt it in order to create a Grid Application Development environment. First, we are convinced that raising the level of abstraction of a Grid system is a key factor to allow development of Grid application. To this purpose, we are investigating the capability of using a set of DSLs for modelling all the features of a Grid environment (e.g. typical resource and information management as well as innovative semantic and knowledge management and specific domain verticalizations) in terms of components and interactions among them. All the produced DSLs will be part of a specialized Software Factory Grid Template (SFGT) that, together with the other "Grid products" (supporting tools, orchestrator engines, frameworks), will be deployed in an extensible IDE in order to create a specialized development environment for Grid applications. The described one is only a proposal and currently we have not tangible results. Even if the software product line's concept is not new, the Microsoft strategy to address this concept is quite recent. First Tech Preview of tools supporting the Software Factories strategy (e.g. for creating, editing and visualizing DSLs) was released in December 2004. Anyway, we have decided to move our efforts toward the Software Factories instead of more mature approaches, like the MDA, for the following reasons: i) according to us, the specificity of DSLs, in contrast with the generality of UML, can provide benefits in the modelling phase of the building blocks of a Grid system and of domain-specific applications, as the e-Learning ones, ii) the Software Factories approach is part of the Microsoft strategy to address HPC market with solutions and products that, according to us, are suitable for development of high performance distributed environment and development of domain specific distributed applications. The advantages and drawbacks of adoption of Microsoft products in order to design and develop Grid systems are described in our previous works as, for example, [START_REF] Baraglia | Design of OGSA-Compliant Grid Information Service Using Microsoft Technologies[END_REF].

THE IMPACT OF OUR APPROACH ON THE ELEGI PROJECT

We have described our proposal to create an environment for development of Grid applications on the basis of the Software Factories methodology and, in this section, we point out the impact that our approach can have on the ELeGI project. As stated in the section 0, one of the main results of the ELeGI project is the definition of a service oriented architecture that we have referred as Semantic Grid for Human Learning and we have defined as a domain verticalization of the Semantic Grid improved with tools, services, languages, standards and technologies for the Education & Training. In [START_REF] Gaeta | ELeGI: The European Learning Grid Infrastructure[END_REF] and [START_REF] Gaeta | Enabling Technologies for future learning scenarios: The Semantic Grid for Human Learning[END_REF], we have justified the adoption of IMS-LD in order to design future learning scenarios that go beyond simple web based LO's delivery, and we have discussed about the advantages gained from the integration of IMS-LD specifications and Grid technologies. Moreover, we argued that IMS-LD is the best approach to modelling teaching and learning practices that are able to include many different pedagogical models that we have identified in [START_REF] Gaeta | Enabling Technologies for future learning scenarios: The Semantic Grid for Human Learning[END_REF] and [START_REF] Allison | Human Learning as a Global Challenge: European Learning Grid Infrastructure[END_REF] and we have judged as fundamental in order to create future learning scenarios. Our aim is to allow the creation of future learning scenarios and applications and we realize the importance of both the modelling of learning and teaching practices and development environments in order to build these scenarios. We foresee that our approach can have a great impact in the development of authoring tools and, in general, development environment for the creation learning specific Grid applications.

The definition of a SFGT is not enough to create a Software Factory for the development of learning applications for Grid systems. In fact, the SFGT is only able to capture the abstractions and behaviours of a Grid system and, obviously, it is not able to capture all the pedagogical features required for the creation of future learning scenarios. To address this issue we propose the definition of additional DSLs providing the semantics of the base elements of IMS-LD (e.g. Activities, Roles, Environment, …) and providing relationships with the DSLs of the SFGT. These additional DSLs will be part of domain specific SFGT. Eventually, higher-level DSLs can be defined upon the previous ones in order to capture more specific features related to different pedagogies and learning approaches.

CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORKS

In this paper, we have presented our ideas in order to create development environment for Grid applications. We have presented the Software Factories approach and we have justified its adoption, for our purpose, with respect to more stable methodologies for software development based on the model-driven approach, as the MDA. As pointed out in the previous sections, currently we have not tangible results and this is also due to the early state-ofart of tools for supporting the DSLs. For instance, currently the Tech Preview of DSL tools support only two templates for DSLs design and do not allow the customization of templates. It is not a simple task to define DSLs able to capture all the necessary Grid abstractions and all the identified pedagogical features in order to create Software Factories Template to support development of Grid applications for the learning domain, but we believe that specificity of DSLs respect to the generality of other modelling languages can be a key features to reach our target. Our first steps will go towards this direction. Finally, we emphasize that our effort aims to hide the complexity of Grid systems and it is lined-up with the "Grid for all" vision. REFERENCES.

FIGURE 1 :

 1 FIGURE 1: The Semantic Grid for Human Learning architecture