Semantic matching of grid resource descriptions

The ability to describe the Grid resources needed by applications is essential for developing seamless access to resources on the Grid. We consider the problem of resource description in the context of a resource broker being developed in the Grid Interoperability Project (GRIP) which is able to broker for resources described by several Grid middleware systems, GT2, GT3 and Unicore. We consider it necessary to utilise a semantic matching of these resource descriptions, firstly because there is currently no common standard, but more fundamentally because we wish to make the Grid transparent at the application level. We show how the semantic approach to resource description facilitates both these aims and present the GRIP broker as a working prototype of this approach.