Ontology Access Provisioning in Grid Environments

The increase of use of semantic technologies has reached almost every computer science related field, including the grid computing field . The next generation Grid should virtualise the notion of distribution in computation, storage, and communication over unlimited resources with well defined computational semantics. A Grid node may provide new services, functions or even new concepts that are unknown to clients. The semantics of such services are defined by means of Ontologies [Gruber, 1993; Gómez-Pérez et al., 2003]. Thus providing the appropriate means for accessing and using Ontologies in the Grid is fundamental if semantic technologies are to be used. So, the transition from monolithic, centralized ontology services to a virtual organization of Grid compliant and Grid aware ontology services that can coordinate and cooperate with each other is crucial to progress towards the Semantic Grid [De Roure et al., 2005].