The Grid Adventures: Sdsc's Storage Resource Broker and Web Services in Digital Library Applications

The data handling infrastructure being developed at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, includes a range of approaches and technologies for managing data, information and knowledge, specifically: (1) self-instantiating and self-validating persistent archives; (2) data handling system providing ubiquitous access to data resources stored in a variety of systems, epitomized in the development of SDSC Storage Resource Broker (SRB); (3) data collection management services, with Extensible Metadata Catalog working in conjunction with SRB; (4) digital library services for information navigation and discovery; (5) information integration across multiple heterogeneous sources and web services, based on SDSC XML-based mediation technologies, and (6) model-based knowledge management, providing conceptual-level mediation and ontology services. This paper reviews the key components of the SDSC data handling infrastructure for scientific data, highlighting our experience with the SRB in a variety of application domains; XML-based information integration (mediation) technologies employing grid Web services, and knowledge management techniques.