A Federated Approach to Information Management in Grids

We propose a novel approach to managing information in grids. The proposed approach is an add-on information system that provides unification and federation of grid information services. The system interacts with local information services and assembles their metadata instances under one hybrid architecture to provide a common query/publish interface to different kinds of metadata. The system also supports interoperability of major grid information services by providing federated information management. We present the semantics and architectural design for this system. We introduce a prototype implementation and present its evaluation. As the results indicate, the proposed system achieves unification and federation of custom implementations of grid information services with negligible processing overheads.