Knowledge Discovery and Ontology-based services on the Grid (a survey report)

Main issues to be faced by next-generation Grids are the management and exploitation of the overwhelming amount of data produced by applications but also by Grid operation, and the intelligent use of Grid resources and services. To achieve these very ambitious goals, next-generation Grids should include knowledge discovery and knowledge management functionalities, for both applications and system management. The way how data and information available at different levels of Grid can be effectively acquired, represented, exchanged, integrated, and converted into useful knowledge is an emerging research field known as "Grid Intelligence". Ontologies and metadata are the basic elements through which such Grid Intelligence can be deployed. Moreover Grids should offer semantic modeling of user’s tasks/needs, available services, and data sources to support high level services and dynamic services finding and composition. This document describes some of these emerging services and a first implementation in the KNOWLEDGE GRID, an environment for the design and execution of geographically distributed highperformance knowledge discovery applications.