Managing Semantic Metadata for the Semantic Grid

Research on the Semantic Web and Web/Grid resource description, discovery and composition is booming but there is currently little effort on a systematic and integrated approach to the management of resources' Semantic Metadata (SMD), nor on key tools that add, store and reuse SMD. In this paper we propose a generic framework for managing resource SMD, in which ontologies are used for metadata modeling and the Web Ontology Language (OWL) for semantic representation. Generated resource SMD are archived in a knowledge repository enhanced with Description Logic (DL) based reasoning capability. A raft of tools, mechanisms and APIs are developed to support SMD management lifecycle, including metadata generation, semantic annotation, knowledge storage and semantic reuse. Both the framework and its supporting technologies have been applied to a large existing e-Science project, which has produced a working resource management prototype. While SMD can be exploited in many ways with regards to resource discovery, provenance and trust, we illustrate their usage through a knowledge advisor that assists resource assembly and configuration in the context of engineering design search and optimisation.