Semantic approach to service discovery in a Grid environment

The fundamental problem that the Grid research and development community is seeking to solve is how to coordinate distributed resources amongst a dynamic set of individuals and organisations in order to solve a common collaborative goal. The problem arises through the heterogeneity, distribution and sharing of the resources in different virtual organisations. Interoperability is a main issue for applications to function with the Grid. This paper proposes a matchmaking framework for service discovery in Grid environments based on three selection stages which are context, semantic and registry selection. It provides a better service discovery process by using semantic descriptions stored in ontologies which specify both the Grid services and the application knowledge. The framework permits Grid applications to specify the criteria a service request is matched with and enables interoperability for the matchmaking process. A proof of concept is done with a prototype implementation, and an enhancement of the matchmaking process is achieved with a similarity metric which allows quantifying the quality of a match. A qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the prototype system is given with an analysis and performance measurements to quantify the scalability of the prototype. (c) 2005 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.