Supporting Collaborative Grid Application Development within the e-Science Community

Collaboration by use of common artifacts is at the core of e-science. A recent enabling technology is the Grid, which ties together heterogeneous computation and data resources through the use of middleware, linking the techniques and resources to infer higher-level knowledge. This article presents results from research and development of Grid technology for semantic interoperability between scientific artifacts on the web. The research employs the ‘industry-as-laboratory’ approach to software development. This means development of theory and models through successive implementations, their deployment in pilot studies and subsequent evaluation studies. The research is exemplified through the case of the OSCAR project, which is directed to the domain of bioinformatics.