Grid metadata catalog service-based OGC web registry service

Grid is a promising e-Science infrastructure that promotes and facilitates the sharing and collaboration in the use of distributed heterogeneous resources through Virtual Organization (VO). A critical factor to the overall utility of Grid is a scalable, flexible and robust registry mechanism. Although it provides some mechanisms to store and access metadata for publishing and discovering resources, such as MCS (Metadata Catalog Service), the Grid registry is inadequate for dealing with domain-specific resources. To enhance the earth science Grid systems, this paper presents a geospatial registry approach in which the OGC (Open GIS Consortium) WRS (Web Registry Service), a <i>de facto</i> standard that supports the publishing of and run-time access to geospatial resources, as a wrapper is used to extend the capabilities of the conventional Grid MCS to the processing of geospatial queries against multiple heterogeneous spatial data sources and services. The approach presented not only focuses on the specifics of descriptive information about spatial data, services, and relevant information objects, but also emphasizes using ontology to infer the semantic relationships between vocabularies for integrating different information models. The implementation of presented approach used in NASA Grid Data Service environment is also illustrated in this paper.