An OWL-S based approach to express grid services coordination

E-science and e-business share the need of a middleware that integrates dynamic services running on distributed, heterogeneous platforms. The Grid community is addressing this problem by moving towards Web services as it is proposed in the Open Grid Service Architecture (OGSA). In this paper we discuss the benefits of using an ontology driven approach to Grid services in order to enhance their composability thus enabling the submission of multiple interoperating jobs. Specifically we introduce an OWL-S extension to describe relations among Grid jobs in order to express coordination-related aspects. This enables to expose coordination requirements in an orthogonal way with respect to single jobs management. As a proof of concept we use this extension to express relations among jobs in order to support the automation of the matchmaking of resources.