Description and Discovery of Web Applications in Grid

Abstract

Most of the shared distributed services on the Internet are developed as modular web applications, based on infrastructures that should provide several functionalities in order to guarantee the effective management and use of resources. Thus an adequate resources’ representation is required for discovery, composition and security goals. This paper starts from the experiences gathered in the broad context of the GRID-IT project, aiming at porting in grid astrophysical applications, to report about the efforts and solutions proposed in describing a web-based application resource and its relationships with discovery. Starting from a grid-based data model (GLUE schema), the descriptions involve the Web Services Description Language (WSDL), its relationships with a web service-based data structure (UDDI schema) to a semantic annotation language for service capabilities (OWL-S or WSDL-S) in order to enhance the discovery task. The steps needed to process the web application in order to provide such information are provided by using existing open-source software tools.