Towards negotiable SLA-based QoS support for biomedical data services

Researchers in data intensive domains, like the Virtual Physiological Human initiative (VPH-I), are commonly overwhelmed with the vast and increasing amount of data available. Advanced studies in biomedicine and other domains often require a considerable amount of effort to achieve data access to a critical mass of relevant data to analyze the problem at hand. We aim to improve this situation and propose a novel application of Quality of Service (QoS) mechanisms for data services. This enables scientists to obtain exactly the data they require, rather than being spoilt for choice which data source might comprise suitable data. The proposed QoS support includes a negotiation model based on service level agreements (SLAs), which in turn comprises data-related service level objectives (SLOs) to express the required guarantees about the quantity or quality of data. Moreover a corresponding QoS management model is presented which resolves the complex process of the SLA generation within data access and data mediation services. The benefits of this approach are materialized in the context of the @neurIST data environment and an initial experimental evaluation demonstrates promising performance improvements in a real world scenario.