Research Agenda for the Semantic Grid: A Future e-Science Infrastructure

TLDR

e‑Science envisions computer and communication technologies that enable scientists to generate, analyze, share, and discuss insights more effectively, but current Grid implementations fall short of providing the seamless, globally collaborative infrastructure required for this vision. This report presents a research agenda aimed at bridging the gap between existing Grid technologies and the full e‑Science vision by outlining the necessary steps to evolve toward a future infrastructure. The proposed agenda introduces the Semantic Grid, an extension of the Grid that incorporates semantic technologies to support easy‑to‑use, automated, and globally collaborative scientific workflows.

Abstract

e-Science offers a promising vision of how computer and communication technology can support and enhance the scientific process. It does this by enabling scientists to generate, analyse, share and discuss their insights, experiments and results in a more effective manner. The underlying computer infrastructure that provides these facilities is commonly referred to as the Grid. At this time, there are a number of grid applications being developed and there is a whole raft of computer technologies that provide fragments of the necessary functionality. However there is currently a major gap between these endeavours and the vision of e-Science in which there is a high degree of easy-to-use and seamless automation and in which there are flexible collaborations and computations on a global scale. To bridge this practice–aspiration divide, this report presents a research agenda whose aim is to move from the current state of the art in e-Science infrastructure, to the future infrastructure that is needed to support the full richness of the e-Science vision. Here the future e-Science research infrastructure is termed the Semantic Grid (Semantic Grid to Grid is meant to connote a similar relationship to the one that exists between the Semantic Web and the Web).