A metadata framework for distributed geo-spatial databases in grid environment

MDS (Monitoring and Discovery Service) is a key infrastructure in grid computing, it mainly undertake registry, updating and discovery of all sorts of resource information of grid environment. This paper developed a MDS-based framework named GridMeta for coping with the problem of distributed geo-spatial metadata. First, we introduced the organization of GridMeta Servers; then we put forward a information model based on DIT, and according to the information model, geo-spatial metadata, service metadata, user metadata and all kinds of Grid resource information can be depicted and stored uniformly; and the last, we provide a set of accessing interfaces of GridMeta APIs, by the interfaces, the registering, adding, deleting, updating and (automatic) discovery of distributed metadata can be implemented.