Schemas and Ontologies: Building a Semantic Infrastructure for the GRID and Digital Libraries Speakers Abstract

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Implementing Ontologies in Grid environments

Traditionally, the Grid has been taken to mean the transparent access to disparate compute and data resources. To date much of the focus has been on how to provide a low level framework to allow inter-operation of these resources. This has been mainly for the benefit of application developers so that they can deploy standard tasks on the Grid in a straightforward manner. However, the SEMANTIC GRID movement is moving the focus of integration to a higher semantic level. The ultimate aim is to empower the user to personally discover and orchestrate Grid enabled resources as required. As in digital libraries, this means cataloguing and indexing available resources using agreed vocabularies. Many user tasks involve the communication of information between sets of Grid services to perform a more complex overall goal. This requires the adoption of standard schemas and semantics for data interchange between Grid services or a mechanism to map between schemas. The talk will examine these issues illustrated with experience from the UK e-Science pilot project myGrid. We will build on previous talks to illustrate how ontologies have been used to describe Grid resources, and the transfer of information between resources.