Web Service Based Knowledge Grid for Biomedicine

The main feature of the Grid, which appeals to communities outside of the high performance computing community, is its ability to share resources across boundaries of institutions and organizations, or in other words, resources that are not subject to centralized control [1]. In computational grids, the shared resource is computing power of processors, thus a computational grid forms a large virtual supercomputer. In data grids the resources are large disk storages and fast networks needed for holding and moving large quantities of data. Collaborative grids create virtual environments for cooperation among geographically dispersed individuals, by using tools for videoconferencing and remote control of shared instruments like telescopes or microscopes. In knowledge grids, the resource shared across organization boundaries is knowledge, so a knowledge grid can constitute a virtual expert system. In this paper, an architecture is presented, designed for sharing biomedical knowledge in the form of a grid consisting of semantically annotated web services, with collaborative user interface. The work presented is part of ongoing research in the project MediGrid, targeted to semantic grid applications in biomedicine. The paper is further structured as follows. In chapter II we discuss how a biomedical knowledge may be encapsulated as a grid service and may be used to build a complex workflow. Chapter III describes how participants may collaborate over a workflow solving a particular task. In the last chapter we will propose a model of an adaptive workflow environment providing a way how to recover from errors occurring during a workflow instance run. The conclusions are then provided.