Accessing Data in Grids Using OGSA-DAI

The grid provides a vision in which resources, including storage and data, can be shared across organisational boundaries. The original emphasis of grid computing lay in the sharing of computational resources but technological and scientific advances have led to an ongoing data explosion in many fields. How- ever, data is stored in many different storage systems and data formats, with different schema, access rights, metadata attributes, and ontologies all of which are obstacles to the access, integration and management of this information. In this chapter we examine some of the ways in which these differences can be addressed by grid technology to enable the meaningful sharing of data. In particular, we present an overview of the OGSA-DAI (Open Grid Service Ar- chitecture - Data Access and Integration) software, which provides a uniform, extensible framework for accessing structured and semi-structured data and pro- vide some examples of its use in other projects. The open-source OGSA-DAI software is freely available from http://www.ogsadai.org.uk.