The Earth System Grid Discovery and Semantic Web Technologies

The Earth System Grid (ESG) is developing a virtual environment based on Grid technologies for the earth sciences and others analyzing the impacts of global climate changes. The goal of ESG is to provide discovery and secure access to very large datasets for earth sciences research. Data discovery through the use of metadata has become a major focus of ESG. Metadata schemas, a prototype ontology, search and discovery services have been developed. ESG discovery mechanisms are being deployed through a service architecture. ESG requirements for data discovery, the need for semantics, and ESG services are discussed. The paper also discusses relevance to the Semantic Web in the context of Grid computing serving pre-defined scien-