The first leg of the trip was by train from Edinburgh to Manchester, through the Borders and across the Lake District on a cold, bright day, with snow still on the hills setting off the green of the open countryside. I stayed overnight in Manchester city centre in a glinting plate-glass hotel opposite Piccadilly Station. A strange flickering in the corner of the eye, which I originally thought must be a dodgy fluorescent light, turned out to be a huge, six-storey high video billboard across the road, advertising through the night (“Move to the off-world colonies!”…”Move to the off-world colonies!”…)

The next morning (3 March) after finding the building where the people we were to meet are based (which is cunningly hidden, Man From U.N.C.L.E.-style, within a 1960s shopping centre on Oxford Rd.), Chris Higgins and I met with Keith Cole and Kamie Kitmitto of MIMAS. Keith is Director of MIMAS, EDINA’s sister national data centre in Manchester; Kamie leads the MIMAS geospatial team; Chris is the EDINA geospatial team’s liaison with the WSTIERIA project. We were later joined by Andrew Rawley from Manchester computing, who has been doing Shibboleth-related work for MIMAS.

I had originally envisaged possible co-operation with MIMAS on WSTIERIA by making some of EDINA’s back-end geospatial web services available for authenticated access. These services would provide data for integration and display in a user-facing MIMAS service (such as Landmap). However, both Keith and Kamie felt that it would be better for MIMAS to make data which they hold available via authenticated web services instead. User-facing EDINA services such as Digimap could then display these data. This was suggested because they viewed EDINA as having stronger capabilities in presenting geographic data with good cartographic quality, while MIMAS’ strength is more in back-end data management. Also the MIMAS geo team is a lot smaller (three people) and user-interface development is very resource-intensive.

In order to pursue this approach, and for EDINA to be able to provide as large a proportion as possible of the short-term development effort (from either WSTIERIA or Chris Higgins’ related OGC Authentication Interoperability Experiment, AuthIE) it would be neccessary for MIMAS to provide IP-address protected access to one or more of their back-end web services from EDINA development machines. This might be harder than it sounds, since currently everything is secured by JBoss mechanisms shared with the production systems, and therefore hard to change. There was agreement though that MIMAS should quantify the level of effort that would be required to create such a development “sandpit”, which would be useful for both WSTIERIA and the AuthIE. Both Keith and Kamie were supportive of the idea, both to enable longer-term interoperability with EDINA and also to build up authentication expertise within the MMAS geo team.

Doing this would open up the prospect of a WSTIERIA demonstrator that might, for example, be able to display aerial images from MIMAS Landmap data aligned with roads or administrative boundary data from EDINA, which could be used to assess the level of end-user interest in such integration before investing major effort in moving to production.

This was the first time I had met either Keith or Kamie, and I came away with a good sense of possible co-operation if resource constraints could be addressed. The meeting was definitely helped along by Kamie offering round some mahmoules (sp?), which seem to be a form of levantine shortbread, filled with dates or pistachio paste, very nice! (Chris says levantine is an archaic word but I disagree!)