Grid 3.0: Services, semantics and society

Abstract

The trend in recent years in distributed computing and distributed information systems has been to open up: to expose interfaces and content outside the bounds of the originating application, resource or middleware; to simplify access to third party resources, data and capability; and to actively encourage and support creativity through the reuse and combination of already available components and content, be they ours or others. The ubiquity of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is testament to the driver, in both industry and scientific research, for more agile solutions, more rapid development, more flexibility and more opportunity for effective use of what has gone before. The rise of the web service and its adoption for Grids are examples. In the sciences the web service has become established as the delivery mechanism for publicly available data sets and tools. Designing reusable components and enabling content to be reusable is tough; finding it. and correctly understanding and using it is even tougher, especially when the consumer is not the producer. Another concern is the gap between the infrastructure and resource provider and the application developer and user. Infrastructure has no value other than to enable applications. In the Grid we seem to have done a good job enabling Virtual Organisations of resource providers through virtualisation and provisioning.