Metadata Management in Grid Database Federation

Metadata management is a common issue in many types of information systems. In the field of integrating distributed database resources to build database federation, because of the heterogeneous nature of various database systems, the task of metadata management can be more complex than in a homogenous environment. The fast growing grid technology provides new approaches for database federation and brings new challenges for metadata management. This survey provides an in-depth view of past and on-going research on metadata management in the construction of grid-based database federation from 1998 to 2006. In this survey, we present our investigation of Metadata related standards, different metadata management solutions such as OGSA-DAI, Metadata Catalog (MCAT) and Metadata Catalog Service (MCS). We also put some emphasis on recent ontology-based metadata management approaches that allow knowledge-oriented data integration.