A Grid-Enabled Digital Library System for Natural Disaster Metadata

The need to organize and publish metadata about European research results in the field of natural disasters has been met with the help of two innovative technologies: the Open Grid Service Architecture (OGSA) and the Resource Description Framework (RDF). OGSA provides a common platform for sharing distributed metadata securely. RDF facilitates the creation and exchange of metadata. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a Grid-based digital library for natural-disaster research metadata. We describe the EU-MEDIN RDF schema that we propose to standardize the description of natural-disaster resources, and the gDisDL Grid service-based architecture for storing and querying of RDF metadata in a secure and distributed manner. Finally, we describe a prototype implementation of gDisDL using the Jena RDF Library by HP and the Globus 3 toolkit.