Designing Grid services for distributed knowledge discovery

The increasing use of computers in all the areas of human activities is resulting in huge collections of digital data. Databases are common everywhere and are used as repositories of every kind of data. Knowledge discovery techniques and tools are used today to analyze those very large data sets to identify interesting patterns and trends in them. When data is maintained over geographically distributed sites the computational power of distributed and parallel systems can be exploited for knowledge discovery in databases. In this scenario the Grid can provide an effective computational support for distributed knowledge discovery on large data sets. To this purpose we designed a system called Knowledge Grid. This paper describes the Knowledge Grid architecture and discusses some related systems and models recently proposed for knowledge discovery on Grids. The paper shows also how to design and implement distributed knowledge discovery services, according to the OGSA model, by using the Knowledge Grid environment starting from searching Grid resources, composing software and data elements, and executing the resulting application on a Grid.