An outline of the global grid forum data access and integration service specifications

Grid computing concerns itself with building the infrastructure to facilitate the sharing of computational and data resources to enable collaboration within virtual organisations. The Global Grid Forum (GGF) provides a framework for users, developers and vendors to come together to develop standards to ensure interoperability between middleware from different service providers. Central to this effort is the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA), and its associated specifications. These define consistent interfaces, generally couched as web services, and the components required to construct grid infrastructures. Both the web service and grid communities stand to benefit from the provision of consistent and agreed web service interfaces for data resources and the systems that manage them. This paper describes, motivates and presents the context for the work that has been undertaken by the GGF Data Access and Integration Services Working Group (DAIS-WG). The group has defined a set of data access and integration interfaces that are consistent with the OGSA vision. A brief overview of the current family of DAIS specifications is given: WS-DAI specifies a collection of generic data resource properties and messages that are specialised by WS-DAIR and WS-DAIX for use with relational and XML data resources, respectively. The WS-DAI specifications can be applied in regular web services environments or as part of a grid fabric. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.