Towards a protocol for the attachment of metadata to grid service descriptions and its use in semantic discovery

Issue title: AxGrids 2004

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Miles, Simon | Papay, Juri | Payne, Terry | Luck, Michael | Moreau, Luc

Affiliations: School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK. Tel.: +44 23 8059 8309; E-mail: sm@ecs.soton.ac.uk

Abstract: Service discovery in large scale, open distributed systems is difficult because of the need to filter out services suitable to the task at hand from a potentially huge pool of possibilities. Semantic descriptions have been advocated as the key to expressive service discovery, but the most commonly used service descriptions and registry protocols do not support such descriptions in a general manner. In this paper, we present a protocol, its implementation and an api for registering semantic service descriptions and other task/user-specific metadata, and for discovering services according to these. Our approach is based on a mechanism for attaching structured and unstructured metadata, which we show to be applicable to multiple registry technologies. The result is an extremely flexible service registry that can be the basis of a sophisticated semantically-enhanced service discovery engine, an essential component of a Semantic Grid.

Journal: Scientific Programming, vol. 12, no. 4, pp. 201-211, 2004