Semantic Grid

Computational and data grids represent an emerging technology that allows geographically and organizationally distributed resources (e.g.computing and storage resources) to be linked and accessed in a fashion that is transparent to the user, presenting an extension of the desktop for users whose computational, data and visualization needs extend beyond their local systems. The New York State Grid is an integrated computational and data grid that provides web-based access for users from around the world to computational, application and data storage resources. This grid is used in a ubiquitous fashion, where the users have virtual access to their data sets and applications, but do not need to be made aware of the details of the data storage or computational devices that are specifically employed. Two of the applications that users worldwide have access to on a variety of grids, including the New York State Grid, are theSnBandBnPprograms, which implement theShake-and-Bakemethod of mol...

Multimedia constitutes an interesting field of application for Semantic Web and Semantic Web reasoning, as the access and management of multimedia content and context depends strongly on the semantic descriptions of both. At the same time, multimedia resources constitute complex objects, the descriptions of which are involved and require the foundation on sound modeling practice in order to represent findings of low-and high level multimedia analysis and to make them accessible via Semantic Web querying of resources. This tutorial aims to provide a red thread through these different issues and to give an outline of where Semantic Web modeling and reasoning needs to further contribute to the area of semantic multimedia for the fruitful interaction between these two fields of computer science. 8 See also the forthcoming W3C Media Fragments Working Group:

This paper describes how semantic bridges realized in terms of rulebased ontology mappings can be incorporated into BPEL processes. The approach is explained by applying it to a semantic system integration scenario in the eBusiness domain defined as the "purchase order mediation" scenario in the context of the Semantic Web Service Challenge 1 . The presented approach relies strongly on the existing Web standards and is based on widely adopted open source software components.

Recent distributed systems, in a P2P scenario, are characterized by a set of independent peers that dynamically need to cooperate by sharing data and services. For effective collaboration, under highly dynamic conditions and in absence of a global view of the resources shared across the information systems, semantic modeling tools need be defined. In particular, the emergence of semantics is a key issue to enforce timely discovery and integration of distributed data and services. In the paper we discuss, in particular, the construction of a semantic overlay for service sharing and discovery in service-oriented applications in a P2P scenario. The semantic overlay is built over the P2P network: each peer has ontology-based service descriptions; semantic links between similar service descriptions belonging to different peers are established and maintained according to the network evolution; the result is P2Pintegrated knowledge space (here considered for services but extendible to data). The semantic overlay can be seen as a continuously evolving conceptual map across collaborative peers that provide similar services and constitute synergic service centres in a given domain. The semantic links enable effective similarity-based service search and optimization strategies are defined for request propagation over the P2P network. From the conceptual modeling perspective, the semantic overlay can be considered as an evolved conceptual representation where specific modeling requirements due to new technologies, service-oriented technology and P2P technology, are considered. The Evolution of Conceptual Modeling

Collaboration among enterprises in a dynamic environment makes the actors to concentrate on their respective core competences and allow provision and sharing of expertise, resources, and skills for taking advantages and better respond to business opportunities. The coming together of such organizations, usually enhanced by computer network, is referred to as virtual enterprise (VE) or task group. This partnership is only possible if the systems in the various associated organizations can process the data in one another. A major challenge in the enterprise collaborative system that has attracted many research efforts in the recent past is semantic interoperability. This collaborative-based market place requires among others common conceptualization and meaningful data exchange. Effective collaboration among VE members is a major key to the accomplishment of this noble objective. For this interoperability to be effective, we propose in this paper an ontology-based middleware framework...

Data Grids allow for seeing heterogeneous, distributed, and dynamic informational resources as if they were a uniform, stable, secure, and reliable database. According to this view, current proposals for data integration on Grids are based on the notion of global schema built over a collection of autonomous information sources. On the other hand, in dynamic and distributed environments, such a hierarchical and centralized architecture is not well suited for effective information integration. Peer-to-peer data integration aims at overcoming these drawbacks by modeling autonomous information systems as peers, and establishing mappings among peers without resorting to any hierarchical structure. In this paper, we present Hyper, a joint research initiative of Università di Roma "La Sapienza" and IBM Italia, which aims at developing principles and techniques for peer-to-peer data integration on a Grid infrastructure. The main contributions presented are a semantic characterization of P2P data integration, the deployment of our P2P framework on a Grid architecture, and the design of a query answering algorithm that is coherent both with the semantics and with the Grid infrastructure.

Grid technology is widely emerging. Still, there is an eminent shortage of real Grid users, mostly due to the lack of a “critical mass” of widely deployed and reliable higher-level Grid services, tailored to application needs. The GridLab project aims to provide fundamentally new capabilities for applications to exploit the power of Grid computing, thus bridging the gap between application needs and existing Grid middleware. We present an overview of GridLab, a large-scale, EU-funded Grid project spanning over a dozen groups in Europe and the US. We first outline our vision of Grid-empowered applications and then discuss GridLab’s general architecture and its Grid Application Toolkit (GAT). We illustrate how applications can be Grid-enabled with the GAT and discuss GridLab’s scheduler as an example of GAT services.

In this paper we present the new project called GridLab which is funded by the European Commission under the Fifth Framework Programme. The GridLab project, made up of computer scientists, astrophysicists and other scientists from various application areas, will develop and implement the grid application toolkit (GAT) together with a set of services to enable easy and efficient use of Grid resources in a real and production grid environment. GAT will provide core, easy to use functionality through a carefully constructed set of generic higher level grid APIs through which an application will be able to call the grid services laying beneath in order to perform efficiently in the Grid environment using various, dramatically wild application scenarios.

1 Albert Einstein Institute, Golm (AEI/MPG) 2 Argonne National Lab (ANL) 3 Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam (VU) 4 Zuse Institute, Berlin (ZIB) 5 Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSNC) 6 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) 7 University of Wales, ...

The interaction between mobile and grid environments in building a transparent infrastructure for mobile users, involves several factors from both wired and wireless networks. These include the following: coordinated application executions, the management of inherent characteristics of mobile devices (disconnections and the problem of a reduced battery lifetime), and making a selection of suitable heterogeneous resources in wired network, which are distinctly in terms of their virtual organizations. For this reason, the main goal of the architecture is the provision of more complete transparency for mobile users, when they need to access the processing capacity of the grid computing environment. To achieve this, this paper outlines an architecture, called MITSIO, together with a prototype implementation that takes these factors into consideration. Furthermore, the study examines two case studies that provide evidence of the capacities of the proposed architecture. The first case stu...

Grid * Is it possible to identify a taxonomy of SLA terms so terms found in SLAs from dierent hosting environments can be classied? • Term languages * WS-Agrement is agnostic of the application environment * Currently, JSDL is used as term language to describe the service terms in a scheduling/resource management environment * More term languages are needed (and partly under work) for using WS-Agreement in other environments, e.g. when dealing with coallocation of resources or services, software licenses, network properties. * Need an agreed term language like EJSDL to express economic data. * Micro-specications needed in WS-Agreement for interoperability * Need agreements with malleable constraints, e.g. having terms with ranges or functions instead of xed values Legal issues * Specify governing legal system (but be aware that there are constraints when trading with a consumer). * Use an overall governing (paper) contract before doing (electronic) SLAs (good place to establish payment processes, locations of access services, SLA negotiator services, . . . ) * Be specic! • To be claried/decided beforehand: Which party carries the risk • Legally Binding * Term doesn't actually help; better to think in terms of whether there is agreement between parties that are legally considered to be able to enter into contracts. * SLAs can be used to modify a contract if there is agreement within the contract to do so; this is the real foundation of SLAs. • Quote vs Invite to Treat * In English law at least, quotes are binding (within reason). * Formally, want customer to make oer and provider to accept it. This is core of WS-Agreement already. • B2B vs B2C * There are additional protections that apply to consumers to prevent certain types of abuse. The details are complex!

Selecting optimal resources for submitting jobs on a computational Grid or accessing data from a data grid is one of the most important tasks of any Grid middleware. Most modern Grid software today satisfies this responsibility and gives a best-effort performance to solve this problem. Almost all decisions regarding scheduling and data access are made by the software automatically, giving users little or no control over the entire process. To solve this problem, a more interactive set of services and middleware is desired that provides users more information about Grid weather, and gives them more control over the decision making process. This paper presents a set of services that have been developed to provide more interactive resource management capabilities within the Grid Analysis Environment (GAE) being developed collaboratively by Caltech, NUST and several other institutes. These include a steering service, a job monitoring service and an estimator service that have been designed and written using a common Grid-enabled Web Services framework named Clarens. The paper also presents a performance analysis of the developed services to show that they have indeed resulted in a more interactive and powerful system for user-centric Gridenabled physics analysis.

Grid computing consists of the coordinated use of large sets of diverse, geographically distributed resources for high performance computation. Effective monitoring of these computing resources is extremely important to allow efficient use on the Grid. The large number of heterogeneous computing entities available in Grids makes the task challenging. In this work, we describe a Grid monitoring system, called GridMonitor,

In previous work we have presented the ZENTURIO experiment management system for performance and parameter studies of parallel and distributed applications on cluster and Grid architectures. In this paper we describe experiences of an on-going work, targeting the implementation of ZENTURIO on top of the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA). We analyse the opportunities offered by a Web services toolkit to develop Grid services as required by OGSA and compare them with the solutions offered by the Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI) specification. Issues regarding proxy management, service lifecycle, UDDI service repository, firewall management, Factory and Registry services, service throughput, and security are comparatively analysed in both implementations.

So far there is very limited tool support for performance-oriented code development, software testing, and parameter studies of high-performance scientific applications. Such an effort commonly requires to conduct a large number of experimental executions. We have developed the ZENTURIO experiment management tool for multi-experimental parameter and performance studies of parallel and distributed applications on cluster and Grid architectures. We describe the design and implementation of ZENTURIO as a Grid application based on state-of-the-art Grid middleware technologies, such as Web services standards and the Globus toolkit. We offer solutions for building Open Grid Services Architecture-compliant Grid services using a pure Web services implementation toolkit. Existing Web services standards such as Universal Description Discovery and Integration and WSDL compatibility are refined for a more coherent integration with the Grid characteristics. We compare our design and implementation with an early prototype built on top of the OGSI technology. We report results on using ZENTURIO for performance study of a material science kernel and parameter study of a financial application.

With the advancements of computer system and communication technologies, Grid computing can be seen as the popular technology bringing about significant revolution for the next generation distributed computing application. As regards general users, a grid middleware is complex to setup and necessitates a steep learning curve. How to access to the grid system transparently from the point of view of users turns into a critical issue then. Therefore, various challenges may arise from the incomprehensive system design as coordinating existing computing resources for the sake of achieving pervasive grid environment. The authors are going to investigate into the current research works of pervasive grid as well as analyze the most important factors and components for constructing a pervasive grid system here. Finally, in order to facilitate the efficiency in respect of teaching and research within a campus, they would like to introduce their pervasive grid platform.

Computational Grids (or simply Grids) enable access to a large number of resources typically including processing, memory, and storage devices. Usually, Grids are used for running very specific applications (most of them related to some kind of scientific hard problem); however, not much attention has been paid to commercial Grid applications. The massive use of such commercial services will depend on fulfilling their special security, usability and quality of service requirements. In this sense, Virtual Private Grid (VPG) provides a way of dynamically create a virtual grid environment with dedicated network resources. In this paper VPG is compared with related work such as the Grid over VPN (GoVPN), the Grid Community (GC) and the Ad-hoc Grid (AG) and the security challenges for VPGs are analyzed.

Grid technologies and infrastructures can contribute to harnessing the full power of computer-aided image analysis into clinical research and practice. Given the volume of data, the sensitivity of medical information, and the joint complexity of medical datasets and computations expected in clinical practice, the challenge is to fill the gap between the grid middleware and the requirements of clinical applications. This chapter reports on the goals, achievements and lessons learned from the AGIR (Grid Analysis of Radiological Data) project. AGIR addresses this challenge through a combined approach. On one hand, leveraging the grid middleware through core grid medical services (data management, responsiveness, compression, and workflows) targets the requirements of medical data processing applications. On the other hand, grid-enabling a panel of applications ranging from algorithmic research to clinical use cases both exploits and drives the development of the services.

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Web services have emerged as a prominent paradigm for the development of distributed software systems as they provide the potential for software to be modularized in a way that functionality can be described, discovered and deployed in a platform independent manner over a network (e.g., intranets, extranets and the Internet). This paper examines an extension of this paradigm to encompass 'Grid Services', which enables software capabilities to be recast with an operational focus and support a heterogeneous mix of business software and data, termed a Business Grid -"the grid of semantic services". The current industrial representation of services is predominantly syntactic however, lacking the fundamental semantic underpinnings required to fulfill the goals of any semanticallyoriented Grid. Consequently, the use of semantic technology in support of business software heterogeneity is investigated as a likely tool to support a diverse and distributed software inventory and user. Service discovery architecture is therefore developed that is (a) distributed in form, (2) supports distributed service knowledge and (3) automatically extends service knowledge (as greater descriptive precision is inferred from the operating application system). This discovery engine is used to execute several real-word scenarios in order to develop and test a framework for engineering such grid service knowledge. The examples presented comprise software components taken from a group of Investment Banking systems. Resulting from the research is a framework for engineering service knowledge from operational enterprise systems for the purposes of service selection and subsequent reuse.

Grid computing provides integration of different environments, creating a unified system, where organizations can share, manage and access different resources regardless of where they are located. However, the lack of integration among different grid computing systems hinders total exploitation of resources. This work investigates and develops an interface for the integration of two heterogeneous grid computing environments: Globus and InteGrade. Such integration transparently increases computational power. Users will be able to submit jobs through both grid environments and applications will be executed in either Globus or InteGrade grids, or even in both.

Opportunistic grid computing middleware has as a main concern the need to preserve the performance of the local applications running on machines that donate resources to the grid. This concern, together with the fact that it happens in an extremely dynamic environment, causes the adoption of a treatment based on the best-effort principle for grid applications. This means that efficient application management schemes are usually not employed, which results in less than optimal performance as grid applications often need to be restarted due to (often temporary) resource claims by local user applications. This paper presents a method to improve the performance of grid applications, taking into account resource usage profiles for local applications, trying to identify when such resource claims are temporary and avoiding costly actions such as the migration of grid tasks. The approach is proposed as an extension to the InteGrade middleware and its evaluation shows promising results for the efficient management of grid applications.

A framework is proposed that creates, uses, and communicates information, whose organizational dynamics allows performing a distributed cooperative enterprise in public environments, even over open source systems. The approach assumes the web services as the enacting paradigm possibly over a grid, to formalize interactions as cooperative services on various computational nodes of a network. The illustrated case study shows that some portions, both of processes and of data or knowledge, can be shared in a collaborative environment, which is also more generally true for any kind of either complex or resource demanding (or both) interaction that will benefit any of the approaches.

This paper presents the MediaGrid project whose goal is the definition of a mediation framework for transparent access to largely distributed sources. Frameworks are reusable pieces of design being expressed as a set of interfaces and components together with the description of their collaboration. Research topics addressed by the MediaGrid project include meta-data design, generation of mediation queries and adaptive and interactive query evaluation.

Service-oriented architectures, and notably Web Services, are becoming an incontrovertible paradigm for the development of applications in pervasive computing environments, as they enable publishing and consuming heterogeneous networked software and hardware resources. Combined with Semantic Web technologies, in particular ontologies, Web services' descriptions can be unambiguously and automatically interpreted in open pervasive computing environments, where agreement on a single common syntactic standard for identifying service semantics cannot be assumed. Nevertheless, efficient matching of semantic Web services to effectively automate the discovery and further consumption of networked resources remains an open issue, which is mainly attributable to the costly underlying semantic reasoning. After analyzing the cost of ontology-based semantic reasoning, which is at the heart of the matching process, we propose a solution towards efficient matching of semantic Web services. We have further incorporated our solution into a service discovery protocol aimed at open pervasive computing environments that integrate heterogeneous wireless network technologies (i.e., ad hoc and infrastructure-based networking). Experimental results show that our solution enables better response times than of classical syntactic-based service discovery protocols.

Purpose– The overwhelming speed and scale of digital media production greatly outpace conventional indexing methods by humans. The management of Big Data for e-library speech resources requires an automated metadata solution. The paper aims to discuss these issues.Design/methodology/approach– A conceptual model called semantic ontologies for multimedia indexing (SOMI) allows for assembly of the speech objects, encapsulation of semantic associations between phonic units and the definition of indexing techniques designed to invoke and maximize the semantic ontologies for indexing. A literature review and architectural overview are followed by evaluation techniques and a conclusion.Findings– This approach is only possible because of recent innovations in automated speech recognition. The introduction of semantic keyword spotting allows for indexing models that disambiguate and prioritize meaning using probability algorithms within a word confusion network. By the use of AI error-traini...

one of the important challenges in grid is quality of service (QoS) for all the accepted users or applications, while increasing the utilization of resources through resource sharing. An effective resource management approach must guarantee the QoS and balance the load among grid nodes which are frequently highly dynamic and heterogeneous. Grid resources are commonly varied regarding their software and hardware formations. Collecting and supervision of these resources, and discovering appropriate resources is an important topic. So semantic can be very useful for resource discovery and resource selection. Fuzzy theory is another intelligent approach which shows uncertainty in Phenomena. In this paper, a novel approach, which is using semantic and fuzzy theory, is proposed to discover grid resource in Grid environment. Search expressiveness, efficiency and scalability, precision and also discover more related resources are the characteristics of the proposed framework.

There has been considerable political pressure, and much hope invested in, the use of Communication and Information Technologies to provide wider access to education, while improving quality and reducing costs. Unfortunately, many of the responses to the challenge of these aspirations have consisted of simple Web technology-driven products which have failed to progress effective learning. We outline the characteristics and pedagogical goals of a learning paradigm that is used to drive the technical requirements, rather than being constrained by what is easily achieved in XHTML. We identify and explain the key roles played by services, semantics and standards in meeting pedagogical goals of novel learning situations, and illustrate with some scenarios which build bridges between traditional learning contexts and future possibilities and, finally, describe an example of a methodology for the creation of future learning scenarios.

Purpose -The general science portal vascoda merges structured, high-quality information collections from more than 40 providers on the basis of search engine technology (FAST) and a concept which treats semantic heterogeneity between different controlled vocabularies. First experiences with the portal show some weaknesses of this approach which come out in most metadata-driven Digital Libraries (DL) or subject specific portals. The purpose of the paper is to propose models to reduce the semantic complexity in heterogeneous DLs. The aim is to introduce value-added services (treatment of term vagueness and document re-ranking) that gain a certain quality in DLs if they are combined with heterogeneity components established in the project "Competence Center Modeling and Treatment of Semantic Heterogeneity". Design/methodology/approach -First, semantic heterogeneity components translate automatically between different indexing languages. This approach will have an impact on search in a scenario when the searcher uses controlled vocabularies which are cross-linked with cross-concordances. However, users usually formulate query terms freely without any vocabulary support. Empirical observations show that freely formulated user terms and terms from controlled vocabularies are often not the same or match just by coincidence. Therefore, a value-added service will be developed which rephrases the natural language searcher terms into suggestions from the controlled vocabulary, the Search Term Recommender (STR). Second, the result sets of transformed or expanded queries in distributed collections are often very large and tests show that the conventional web-based ranking methods are not appropriate for presenting heterogeneous metadata records as suitable result sets to the user. Therefore, two methods, which are derived from scientometrics and network analysis, will be implemented with the objective to re-rank result sets by the following structural properties: the ranking of the results by core journals (so-called Bradfordizing) and ranking by centrality of authors in co-authorship networks. Findings -The methods, which will be implemented, focus on the query and on the result side of a search and are designed to positively influence each other. Conceptually they will improve the search quality and guarantee that the most relevant documents in result sets will be ranked higher. Originality/value -The central impact of the paper focuses on the integration of three structural value-adding methods which aim at reducing the semantic complexity represented in distributed DLs at several stages in the information retrieval process: query construction, search and ranking, and re-ranking.

This paper presents an application of business intelligence (BI) for electricity management systems in the context of the Smart Grid domain. Combining semantic web technologies (SWT) and elements of grid computing (GC), we have designed a distributed architecture of intelligent nodes, which are called power grid distributed nodes (PGDINs). This distributed architecture supports the majority of the grid management activities in an intelligent and collaborative way by means of distributed processing of semantic data. A node collaborative scheme is defined based on logical states that each node presents according to the events occurring in the grid. A specific BPEL business-workflow is formally defined for each logical state, based on the node's knowledge base (an electrical model) and the distributed data. The introduced core workflows allow the potential grid behavior to be predefined when a business requirement is triggered. Thus, this approach supports the grid to react and reach over again a stable state, which is defined as a working state that facilitates the provision of the required business tasks. We have validated our approach with the simulation of a well-known use case, the energy balancing verification, fed with real data from the Spanish electrical grid.

Remote job submission and execution is fundamental requirement of distributed computing done using Cluster computing. However, Cluster computing limits usage within a single organization. Grid computing environment can allow use of resources for remote job execution that are available in other organizations. This paper discusses concepts of batch-job execution using LRM and using Grid. The paper discusses two ways of preparing test Grid computing environment that we use for experimental testing of concepts. This paper presents experimental testing of remote job submission and execution mechanisms through LRM specific way and Grid computing ways. Moreover, the paper also discusses various problems faced while working with Grid computing environment and discusses their troubleshootings. The understanding and experimental testing presented in this paper would become very useful to researchers who are new to the field of job management in Grid.

Grid computing has attracted many researchers over a few years, and as a result many new protocols have emerged and also evolved since its inception a decade ago. Grid protocols play major role in implementing services that facilitate coordinated resource sharing across diverse organizations. In this paper, we provide comprehensive coverage of different core Grid protocols that can be used in Global Grid Computing. We establish the classification of core Grid protocols into i) Grid network communication and Grid data transfer protocols, ii) Grid information security protocols, iii) Grid resource information protocols, iv) Grid management protocols, and v) Grid interface protocols, depending upon the kind of activities handled by these protocols. All the classified protocols are also organized into layers of the Hourglass model of Grid architecture to understand dependency among these protocols. We also present the characteristics of each protocol. For better understanding of these protocols, we also discuss applied protocols as examples from either Globus toolkit or other popular Grid middleware projects. We believe that our classification and characterization of Grid protocols will enable better understanding of core Grid protocols and will motivate further research in the area of Global Grid Computing.

Recent advances in research methods and technologies have resulted in an explosion of information and knowledge about cancers and their treatment. Knowledge Discovery (KD) is a key technique for dealing with this massive amount of data and the challenges of managing the steadily growing amount of available knowledge. In this paper, we present the ACGT integrated project, which is to contribute to the resolution of these problems by developing semantic grid services in support of multi-centric, post-genomic clinical trials. In particular, we describe the challenges of KD in clinico-genomic data in a collaborative Grid framework, and present our approach to overcome these difficulties by improving workflow management, construction and managing workflow results and provenance information. Our approach combines several techniques into a framework that is suitable to address the problems of interactivity and multiple dependencies between workflows, services, and data.

The added value the Semantic Web has to offer can find fertile ground in querying collections with rich metadata, such as ones often occurring in digital libraries and repositories. A relevant such effort is the semantic search service for the popular DSpace digital repository system. Semantic Search v2 introduces a structured query mechanism that makes query construction easier as well as several improvements in system design, performance and extensibility. Queries are targeted towards the dynamically created DSpace ontology, containing constructs that enable knowledge acquisition among available metadata. Both an empirical and a quantitative evaluation suggest that the system can bring semantic search closer to inexperienced users and make its benefits evident in the context of digital repositories, such as new querying dimensions, thus forming a paradigm production services can built upon.

Earth Science (ES) is an all-encompassing term for sciences related to the planet Earth like seismology, geology, hydrology, and meteorology. DEGREE is a Specific Support Action (SSA) project that aims to promote Grid technologies throughout the large and diverse Earth Science community as a platform for e-collaboration in academic and industrial organizations.

To be successful the grid must serve a variety of application domains. The data management solutions offered by existing grid middleware have significant shortcomings with respect to the needs of some of these application domains. This paper attributes these shortages to a lack of an underlying grid storage infrastructure, similar to that within an operating system. In an effort to develop this missing infrastructure we have created a relatively complete grid filesystem comprising four abstract engines for directory management, discovery, data movement and consistency. This will facilitate simple data management both within and between grids.

The purpose of this study was to explore how a platform for collaborative ontology maintenance could enhance curriculum development in the domain of ICTrelated vocational education. Although ontology engineering and maintenance are increasingly important in the era of Semantic Web, engaging the community in ontology-driven knowledge management is still challenging in many areas, including curriculum development. The result of our study is an empirically validated prototype of a collaborative ontology maintenance solution built with Semantic MediaWiki and Concept Maps, guided by the Methontology life cycle model. The method enabled the researchers also to evaluate external validity of the domain ontology for vocational ICT education.

Grid Computing is becoming more popular. The traditional role of the Internet as being an information repository is evolving to become a resource repository. People using the Internet will want to do more than just look for information, they will want to exploit the resources available. Grid Computing provides platforms to facilitate such requirements. Various Grid middlewares have been developed to offer access to vast resources ranging from computing power to application functionality to specialised physical resources. This paper details the programming model used for heterogeneous environments exploited by WebCom-G. In addition to describing the tools and methodologies used for this computing environment, a brief outline of WebCom-G (WebCom Grid) and some of its capabilities is given.

The notion of software ecosystems has been popular both in research and industry for more than a decade, but how software ecosystems are created still remains unclear. This becomes more of a challenge if one examines the "creation" of ecosystems that have high probability in surviving in the future, i.e. with respect to ecosystem health. In this paper, we focus on the creation of software ecosystems and propose a process for designing, developing, and establishing software ecosystems based on three basic steps and a set of activities for each step. We note that software ecosystem research identifies that ecosystems typically emerge from either a company deciding to allow development on their product platform or from a successful open source project. In our study we add to this knowledge by demonstrating, through two case studies, that ecosystems can emerge from more than a technological infrastructure (platform). We identify that ecosystems can emerge out of two more distinct types of environments and thus the design should be based on the characteristics of this categorization. Moreover, we follow the approach that design, development, and establishment are not three distinct phases but rather aspects of a single re-iterating phase and thus propose the view of design, development, and establishment as a continous process, running in parallel with and interrelated to the monitoring of the ecosystem evolution.

The notion of software ecosystems has been popular both in research and industry for more than a decade, but how software ecosystems are created still remains unclear. This becomes more of a challenge if one examines the "creation" of ecosystems that have high probability in surviving in the future, i.e. with respect to ecosystem health. In this paper, we focus on the creation of software ecosystems and propose a process for designing, developing, and establishing software ecosystems based on three basic steps and a set of activities for each step. We note that software ecosystem research identifies that ecosystems typically emerge from either a company deciding to allow development on their product platform or from a successful open source project. In our study we add to this knowledge by demonstrating, through two case studies, that ecosystems can emerge from more than a technological infrastructure (platform). We identify that ecosystems can emerge out of two more distinct types of environments and thus the design should be based on the characteristics of this categorization. Moreover, we follow the approach that design, development, and establishment are not three distinct phases but rather aspects of a single re-iterating phase and thus propose the view of design, development, and establishment as a continous process, running in parallel with and interrelated to the monitoring of the ecosystem evolution.

Grid computing is the next generation of distributed system. Its goal is to create a huge, independent and powerful virtual machine, and it has been created by gathering different machines with the aim of sharing them. Resource discovery is the most fundamental phase of resource management which has been considered in our work. Considering the advantages and disadvantages of P2P and grid and their architectural similarity; using some of P2P approaches as a solution in Grid can improve the performance of Grid. Semantic technology and fuzzy logic are the two intelligent approaches, which recently apply on P2P network and Grid environment. In P2P networks, nodes are grouping based on their interests. Moreover semantic can be very useful for grouping nodes. This paper follows the identification of resource discovery in grid environment with the help of semantic and fuzzy theory and seeking to present a resource discovery algorithm with respect to exiting obstacles. The proposed approach...

Many new applications, for example Wikis, social networks, and distributed recommender systems, require the efficient integration of decentralized and heterogenous data sources at a large scale. In this paper, we present our vision of a universal storage for RDF-like triple data based on a structured P2P system and the universal relation model as its key enabling technologies to achieve flexibility, robustness, and efficiency for large-scale distributed data storage and query processing. We outline the steps we have already accomplished successfully and discuss a roadmap to achieve the final goal of a practical, lightweight implementation of our storage system.

The trend towards ubiquitous public services is driving the deployment of large-scale, heterogeneous, distributed information services. In order to support automated information access and processing, this information is marked up using semantic metadata models represented using ontology languages such as OWL. The use of such a semantic metadata model is twofold: to enable content-based access and to provide services that enable users and applications to select, employ, compose and monitor web-based resources automatically. Deployment of a semantic model consists of the semantic metadata model itself and the semantic services to leverage the semantic metadata within application services. The main objective of this paper is to show how an existing semantic-based security management of open services framework has been extended to improve the safety of services using a semantic error management model. It has been applied to an application that queries multiple distributed environmental database resources.

Semantic Web promises to add metadata to web content to make it understandable to computers. Search is the most widely used activity on web. Semantic search engines have already changed the way we search the data on web. Uren. V, Yuanguilei Uren et al., proposed requirement space pyramid arguing that iterative and exploratory search modes are important to the usability of search engines. It identified the types of semantic queries the users need to make, the issues concerning the search development and the problems intrinsic to semantic search in particular. We have extensively examined the semantic search engines and have done broad survey to analyse the semantic search engines. Comparative analysis of the semantic search engines have been done on the basis of factors cited in the pyramid. The research provides deep understanding of five main semantic search engines based on comparative analysis that may help for future work for semantic web in general and for semantic search engines in particular.

Rapid development of new technologies for information management and knowledge extraction, evaluation and fusion, as well as introduction of new computational paradigms supporting such task will have a great influence on creation of future generation computer systems and very innovative, and efficient information and services management solutions for grid environment and pervasive computing. Such computational paradigms are very important especially while performing semantic analysis of acquired information or providing distributed or remote services considering user preferences and social requirements. Additionally, considering management activities in very large infrastructures like Cloud Computing and Big Data repositories, new approaches should focus not only on collecting, processing, intelligent searching and dissemination of information collected from different sources, but should enable to perform a deeper analysis, considering semantic meaning evaluation, data structures, and personal preferences in which such data may be applied for information and services management, and data distribution over global network or information society. Such pervasive and ubiquitous management paradigms are based on advanced ambient technologies like cyber world, smart cities, and virtual reality. In this paper will be presented several selected approaches development of such management technologies, and which are very important both from scientific and practical points of view..