Ontological Representation of Grid Resources

Modern Grid solutions provide now variety of middleware solutions that are supposed to help manage resources available in the Grid environment, but most of these solutions are based on specific formats for each aspect of the Grid, thus making inconvenient integration and making complete virtualization of resources difficult. Our response to needs for a more uniform way of defining metadata in the Grid environment is using ontologies as a formalism for unified representation of various kinds of metadata in the Grid. In the context of automatic workflow composition from semantically annotated Grid services, an extensible and distributed framework for management of semantic metadata in Grid environment called Grid Organizational Memory (GOM) was developed.

The objective was to define knowledge representation paying attention to the distributed nature of a working environment and allowing collaborative development of ontologies within any application domain. The result was the separation schema for the GOM ontologies. GOM contains the prototype versions of generic ontologies, domain specific ontologies and supports management of ontological registries. The framework architecture also reflects separation of Grid on Virtual Organizations (VO). GOM prototype is available in terms of public license. It is being used for development of ontology similarity for VO development and semi-automatic construction of workflow-type grid applications.

The scientific research in the framework of EU IST-2002-511385 K-WfGrid project and KBN Grant is being performed in tight cooperation with:

• Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Architecture and Software Technology, Berlin
• Institute for Computer Science, University of Innsbruck
• Institute of Informatics of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava

Researchers: R. Słota, M. Majewska, M. Kuta, S. Polak, J, Kitowski with ACK Cyfronet AGH collaborators: B. Kryza, Ł. Dutka.

Usage of Grid Organizational Memory for workflow composition