Grid Services Engineering and Management

The grid paradigm is an useful technique in the astronomical community to enable the information discovery with a very large amount of massive and complex data. Astronomical datasets are essentially structured in catalogs and archives managed by several database management systems. Porting these data in a grid environment has twofold aspects according to put or not the entire management system on grid: this paper presents an approach of a grid application deploy based on web services technology to access an existing astronomical database. The framework hosting the application consists of the grid infrastructure provided by the Italian INFN Institute [1]: this middleware affects both technological choices than current and further develops in order to maintain the compatibility. The document covers the implementation design in this context of all the actors involved in the web service architecture (service requestor, service provider and service broker) and the mapping with their corresponding grid components. This relation gives the interoperability of web services within the existing grid architecture. It is detailed point out the open problem of service discovery in this grid environment: the current implementation of service registry through WS-Inspection documents [2] and/or Universal Description, Discovery and Integration [3] registry could be adopted in a local grid infrastructure, but should be progressively integrated with the main grid information system up to now implemented as Globus Monitoring and Discovery Service (MDS2) [4]. 1 Astronomical Data Resources in a Virtual Organization Environment According to the definition of the grid concept [5], a grid solution is created to allows applications to share data and resources as well to access them across multiple organizations in an efficient way. Each solution can be configured as a physical grid referring to hardware resources shared over a distributed network or as a logical grid referring to software and application sharing. In a research environment such as the astronomical community, one of the key concerns is to find more standard and scalable way to integrate massive and complex data coming from digital survey in a distributed environment. This data has an exponential growth that causes the problem of information discovery with such amount of data. In this context the grid paradigm is a technique able