Karuna, This is very cool. Thanks for sharing it.
I was curious about how the tool decides to relax constraints. It appears to start at the bottom of the list and work up in an iterative (accumulative) process, stopping at the first match. For instance, if a user is looking for an Windows image with FIPS140 authentication, no encryption and data deleted, there are no results. Then, depending on which constraint is relaxed first, a different set of results will emerge. If, for example, "Image data deletion" is relaxed, the user will receive one result (this is the default). If, however, "Image data encryption" is relaxed, the user receives four results. On the other hand, if "User auth mech" is relaxed, the user receives a different set of four results. The three result sets described are, as you would anticipate, disjoint sets. >From a user's perspective, it might be nice to show all three sets, >identifying which constraint(s) were relaxed in order to find the results. >Then, the user makes the decision about which constraint should be relaxed. Feel free to ignore this suggestion, but if I were using this interface, I would want the resolution piece to work something like this (I realize that this is more computationally intensive): If no results are found: For each constraint, run a new SparQL query with only that one constraint removed If there were results from any of the queries: display the result set(s) end Else: For each constraint pair, run a new SparQL query with those two constraints removed If results from any query: display the result set(s) end Else: For each constraint triple... The worst case would involve 2^n queries (each iteration would involve n! / k! (n - k)! queries) , so it would be important to keep the total number of constraints (i.e. n) quite low, though in practice, I would be surprised if that were to happen. One could also programmatically eliminate any option from the interface that didn't discriminate between images. For instance, the value of "location" is the same for all images in your sample set, so you may want to simply add a "disabled" attribute to the <select> element. In any case, you wouldn't want those values to contribute to the n in the combination. Also, for the CC Evaluation Assurance Level, you may want to use a drop-down list rather than a text field. Aaron -- Aaron Coburn Systems Administrator and Programmer Academic Technology Services, Amherst College [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> On Jul 27, 2012, at 1:47 AM, Karuna P Joshi wrote: Hello, The first version of the VCL Cloud broker is up and running and can be accessed at http://152.46.16.138/broker/ Users can select from any of the options and choose to either include or ignore the security and compliance constraints. Pressing the "?" next to the field will display 'Help' for that fields. The tool will automatically remove the search constraints till it finds the matching VCL Image(s). One can click on the individual Image records to see the details and reserve the Image . The reserve image functionality is not functional at present . Based on the feedback I had received from this group in the past, I have reduced the buttons on the screen. As always, I look forward to comments and feedback for the same. regards, Karuna ____________________ Karuna Pande Joshi CSEE Dept, UMBC [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>, [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
