Unifying Grid Metadata Representations Through Ontologies

Grid environments provide now variety of middleware solutions that are supposed to help manage resources available in the Grid environment. In this paper, the need for a more uniform way of defining metadata in the Grid is presented. A proposition for using ontologies as a formalism for unified representation of various kinds of metadata in the Grid is given. Also description of basic requirements that every Grid metadata approach should address and how these requirements can be fulfilled with ontologies is provided. Finally, a brief decription of example of such an approach taken in EU K-Wf Grid Project is described.