Speaker
Mr
Ioan Toma
(DERI Innsbruck)
Description
The Grid has emerged as a technology aiming at enabling
resource sharing and
coordinated problem solving in dynamic multi-institutional
virtual organizations [6],
[8]. Grids are used to join various geographically
distributed computational and data
resources, and deliver these resources to heterogeneous user
communities. While the
initial research on Grid computing was focused mainly on
providing a seamless access
to a heterogeneous suite of computational and data
resources, current efforts are
addressing the provision of a global distributed
infrastructure based on service
oriented paradigm. More and more grid toolkits are nowadays
are following a service
oriented approach by exposing and handling resources as
services. However a flexible
service Grid is not possible without support by semantic
technologies which lead to
what is know as Semantic Grid. Semantic Grid comes as an
extension of current Grid in
which information and services are given well-defined
meaning [4]. Knowledge about
resources is exposed and handled explicitly thus allowing a
certain degree of
automation in realizing various tasks on the Grid.
Furthermore, the information which
is going to be manipulated in a service Grid has to be
semantically described. This
will allow services to better interpret and manipulate the
content of the information
they are processing.
In our ongoing work in GRISINO project [1] - Grid semantics
and intelligent objects,
we aim of integrating three leading edge technologies which
complement
each other, for the definition of intelligent and dynamic
business and scientific
processes: (1) Semantic Web Services (SWS) as the future
standard for the
declaration of web-based semantic processes, (2) Intelligent
content objects as
the unit of value which can be manipulated by semantic web
services and (3)
Grid Computing as a pervasive service distribution
infrastructure for a future,
ambient intelligence space.
Grid computing is a central pillar for our GRISINO platform,
providing a
computational and organizational infrastructure. It can be
seen as the resource
backbone of GRISINO platform in terms of computational and
storage power.
The present abstract summarizes the authors initial ideas on
how Grid computing, as
one fundamental pillar of GRISINO platform, will be
integrated with Semantic Web
Services and Intelligent Content Objects in order to provide
platform which supports
intelligent and dynamic business and scientific processes.
The reminder of this abstract is structured as follows.
First we describe our initial
ideas on how Grid computing and Semantic Grid as its
semantic extension could play
the role of a hosting infrastructure for Semantic Web
Services. Then we point the
need of Grid computing as a supporting infrastructure for
Intelligent Content Objects
and how these technologies could be integrated. Finally we
conclude our paper by
pointing out the fundamental role of Grid computing as a
foundation block of our
infrastructure.
1 Grid computing and Semantic Web Services
Among the technologies which are nowadays following a
service oriented paradigm, Web
services and Grid computing have the biggest impact both on
academia and industry. A
closer look at Web services and Grid computing shows that
these two areas have a lot
in common. A resource on the Grid can be view as a service.
Latest directions in Grid
and Web services [3] provide a uni¯ed framework that deals
with both Grid and Web
services requirements. What is missing is a proper support
for machine processable
semantics and therefore human intervention is needed to
actually discover, combine,
and execute services. Semantic Web services promise to
solved this problem by
providing a fully mechanized web infrastructure for
computers interactions [5].
By using semantic technologies the Semantic Grid vision can
be achieved. For example,
ontologies, which provide machine understandable
terminologies, will be used to
describe resources and services on the Grid. The Semantic
Grid will be a grid of
services semantically annotated. Both domain ontologies
(e.g. physic, biology
ontologies) and infrastructure onotlogies (e.g. virtual
organiation ontologies,
service ontologies) will be required. They will allow a
sertain degree of automation
for tasks like Grid service discovery or negotiation of
service level agreements. All
these tasks can be potentially enhanced using the
functionalities provided by SWS
technologies.
Another possible integration point is around the Open Grid
Service Architecture
(OGSA) [7]. The OGSA framework, a conceptual model for
Grids, defines a set of
services which are needed for grid applications. However,
OGSA doesnt provide a
formal way to describe these services, thus being of little
use in automatic
performance of different service related tasks. One
particular way to realize the
(Semantic) Grid vision by integrating support for SWS into
current Grid architectures
is to semantically enhance current OGSA services, as for
example infrastructure, data
or information services. Last but not least all domain grid
services which will use
the Semantic Grid infrastructure will be annotated with
semantic descriptions.
2 Grid computing and Intelligent Content Objects
Intelligent Content Objects can be seen as semantically
described and annotated
content. In GRISINO, Intelligent Content Objects will be
produced and manipulated on
a large scale by applications, agents and services hosted by
the GRISINO
infrastructure. Given this high scale dimension in terms of
computation and storage,
Grid computing is a natural choice to follow.
Huge amounts of Intelligent Content Objects or KCOs will
likely be stored on a
special form of grids called Data Grids [2]. They will allow
fast storage, indexing
and retrieval of content information in a short amount of
time. For example an
intelligent content object capturing information about a
movie can be replicated or
transformed using different services. The space needed to
store these objects grows
along with the number of operations invoked on these
objects. Therefor a huge amount
of disk space is required which can be hopefully provided by
the Data Grid.
The huge amount of storage capabilities is not the only
aspect where Grid and
Semantic Grid technologies could could empower our GRISINO
infrastructure. The other
huge scale dimension aspect relates to the huge
computational capabilities provided
by Grid. This integration dimension between Intelligent
Content Objects and Grid
Commuting will also be investigated in our integration
solution. Coming back to our
previous example it is likely that an intelligent content
object capturing
information about a movie will require allot of
computational power when processed by
services hosted by GRISINO common system infrastructure
(e.g. a movie rendering
service). Such power could be easily provided by a
Computational Grid that exposes
computers and computers clusters as a uniform accessible
computational platform.
3 Conclusion
Finally, we believe that the research in Semantic Web
Service provide a solid basis
for an integrated service oriented Semantic Grid.
Furthermore we believe that the new
Semantic Grid infrastructure which will emerge by combining
Grid and Semantic Web
services will provided a robust and flexible infrastructure
for intelligent
manipulation of information content. Our work on the
integration aspects mentioned
above has just started. We plan to further investigate the
integration points
previously mentioned and to prove our ideas by developing an
experimental testbed -
the GRISINO platform.
4 Acknowledgements
The work is funded by the FIT-IT (Forschung, Innovation,
Technologie - Infor-
mationstechnologie) under the project GRISINO - Grid
semantics and intelligent
objects. The authors would like to thank all the people who
are involved in
GRISINO project and the funding support from Austrian
Government.
References
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Author
Mr
Ioan Toma
(DERI Innsbruck)
Co-authors
Mr
Daniel Doegl
(uma GmbH, Vienna)
Mr
Omair Shafiq
(DERI Innsbruck)
Mr
Tobias Buerger
(Salzburg Research)
