Towards the Semantic Grid: Enriching Content for Management and Reuse

Knowledge and Semantic Web technologies are evolving the Grid towards the Semantic Grid [18] to facilitate knowledge reuse and collaboration within a community of practice. In the Geodise project we are exploring the application of a range of knowledge and Semantic Web technologies to assist users in solving complex problems in Engineering Design Search and Optimization (EDSO), in particular enabling semantically enriched resource sharing and reuse. The target of content enrichment in Geodise ranges from command usage described in software manuals, a set of profile data, to a workflow customized to solve a particular problem. They become semantically enriched when their representations are delivered using a set of shared semantics which are well recognized in the domain. Knowledge acquisition and knowledge modelling (in particular ontology building) are the key steps to build these semantics. The repository of semantically enriched content can be regarded as a resource based on which various knowledge services [4] are made available to and integrated into a Problem Solving Environment (PSE) to assist an engineer in design optimization routines. For example, when constructing a script to generate a computational mesh, an ontology assisted domain script editor can provide syntax highlighting and context sensitive knowledge-driven auto-completion and advice. A rule-based workflow advisor gives guidance on building a domain workflow by reasoning over semantically enriched system states [6]. The workflow construction process itself is driven by task ontology so as to guarantee that the resulting workflow instances are enriched with consistent semantics. In this paper we demonstrate how a number of technologies have been deployed in EDSO.