GIST: Grid Services Conversation Language

The Grid is becoming a significantly important vehicle for business transactions by means of service-oriented architecture (SOA). In that direction, the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) is a prominent initiative that aims at providing a standardised set of capabilities and behaviours that address key concerns in Grid systems. However, the challenge remains in harnessing the potential of Grid trading partners to communicate in a meaningful way. In this paper, we present GIST, a grid services conversation language that fosters formal behavioural specifications, based on GECO, a fully-fledged architecture and proof-of-concept execution environment implementation.