Semantic Discovery of Services in a Grid Environment

Abstract

Grid is an emerging technology for enabling resource sharing and coordinated problem solving in dynamic multi-institutional virtual organizations. In the Grid environment, the resources may belong to different institutions, have different usage policies and pose different requirements on acceptable requests. One of the fundamental operations needed to support location-independent computing is resource discovery. Before resources can be allocated to run an application, a user or agent must discover resources appropriate to the requirements of the application. This process of locating relevant resources based on application requirements is called resource discovery. The ability to describe these Grid resources and services needed by applications is essential for providing seamless access to them on the Grid. However, as yet there is no universal resource description language common to all Grid middleware systems. Different Grid middleware systems have different ad hoc methods of resource description and it is not yet known how well these can interoperate. Hence, there is a need to utilize semantic matching of these resource descriptions, firstly because there is currently no common standard, and secondly to make the Grid transparent at the application level. In this thesis work, we have setup a grid environment and then implemented a semantic based search approach to discover the resources and services similar to the ones requested by the user. Semantic search methods seek to augment and improve traditional search results by finding services that have similar concepts not just similar descriptions. Using semantic information for the matchmaking process achieves better results than exact keyword matching prevalent in most of the resource discovery approaches used today.