A semantic-aware information system for multi-domain applications over service grids

Service-oriented Grid frameworks offer resources and facilities to support the design and execution of distributed applications in different domains, ranging from scientific applications and public computing projects to commercial and industrial applications. A critical issue in such a context is the management of the heterogeneity of resources and services offered by a Grid, including computers, data, and software tools provided by different organizations. This paper presents a general architecture of a service-oriented information system, which exploits the characteristics of a multi-domain and semantically enriched metadata model. The main objective of the information system is to uniformly manage service-oriented applications and basic resources by assuring metadata persistence through an XML distributed database, without merely relying on the functionalities of persistent Grid services. The information system has been implemented on the basic services of the WSRF-based Globus Toolkit 4 and its performance has been evaluated in a testbed.