SDDG: Semantic Desktop Data Grid

Jingtao Zhou, Rong Mo, Mingwei Wang, Rongxia Zhang, Min Shi, Haicheng Yang, Tao Yue
The Key Laboratory of Contemporary Design and Integrated Manufacturing Technology, Ministry of Education,
Northwestern Polytechnical University,
Xi’an, China


Abstract—Recent advances in grid, semantic web, P2P and web
services have revolutionized the way we communicate and
collaborate. Undertaking the intersection fulfillment of these
technologies on enterprise desktop computers enables new
integrative and collaborative use of not only organizational data
but also distributed, autonomous personal data on the web by
fully leveraging potentially useful information sources on many
desktops. In this context, we introduce SDDG, a p2p-semantic-
grid enabled information sharing infrastructure for entire
enterprise information, which wraps both organizational and
personal information sources as semantic grid services and
creates a semantic information interoperability environment
following a p2p data coordination way. Through a discussion of
fundamental scientific positions in general and approaches to
information integration research in particular, we depict the
basic integration principles from both P2P and semantic grid
perspectives. The key contributions of this paper are a P2P
semantic grid service oriented framework for SDDG, which is an
extension of our previous work [1][2] by reflecting principles of
P2P data integration in semantic grid.
Keywords: Semantic desktop; data grid; P2P; semantic grid
I. INTRODUCTION
Today’s enterprise information and knowledge pervade
everywhere of the enterprise rather than only the enterprise-
wide databases. This is especially true for that more and more
knowledge achieved by individual may be stored into personal
desktop besides common data sources in enterprise. To
accomplish a complex task, knowledge workers need achieve
any relative information not only from common data sources
but also individual data sources by any possible way. However,
the continuously increasing information and knowledge in
personal computers managed by individual employees is
neglected although enterprises have tackled information
sharing inside their specific domains for more than a decade.
Integrating and sharing all potentially useful information within
entire enterprise, it must be of great benefit to both individual
and group in collaborative work, research, even business
decision and action. Unfortunately, current enterprise
information infrastructure is poorly suited for dealing with the
continuing, rapid explosion in data both in common and
personal information sources.
Our effort is to propose a semantic integration architecture
for both corporate and personal information based on Semantic
Grid and p2p to expand their applicability in the area of
Semantic Desktop. We give a survey of data integration on
Grid, p2p data integration and semantic desktop in section II.
Section III discusses the vision and criteria of SDDG. Section
IV presents the architecture of SDDG and discusses our
approach in detail. Section V gives the concluding remarks and
future perspectives.
II. SURVEY
A. Data Integration on Grid
In the context of information integration and sharing, Grid
technologies distinguish current information integration
technologies in enterprise (eg. federated systems, data
warehouse, etc.) by providing not a generic approach but also
an open and standard-based infrastructure. Using of the
proposed Grid technologies (Open Grid Services Architecture
Data Access and Integration (OGSA-DAI) [3], OGSA-DQP [4]
etc.) is becoming popular for standard-based access of
heterogeneous resources. Some industry products, such as IBM
WebSphere Information Integrator V8.2 has supported OGSA-
DAI by implementing a Grid wrapper [5].
The current efforts of the Data Grid community mainly
concentrate on providing a global, uniform access methodology
for all database resources. However, the functional level
integration way of Grid-based Virtual Databases[6] has limited
the exploitation of Data Grids in many real situations[7]. This
motivates information grid projects to shift the emphasis on
information integration and mediation. Moreover, the emerging
of Semantic Grid is beginning to take this further, from
information to semantic or knowledge. Some projects, to some
extent, such as COG [8]and Dart-Grid [9] explore this trend in
the context of information integration.
The COG project aims to integrate disparate data sources
on semantic level by using a central Information Model (i.e.
ontology). However, although COG means “Corporate
Ontology Grid”, it does not seem to intend to use general Grid
technologies. In essence, it is a solution following an ontology-
based information integration approach [10]. Compared to
COG, Dart-Grid is an OGSA-based Database Grid originally
motivated by the application of web-based data sharing and
database integration for Traditional Chinese Medicine. In
particular, data sources integrated by Dart-Grid are mainly
databases, other data sources such as documents, and data
sources that stream data in real or pseudo-real time from
applications are not supported by current Dart-Grid.
Furthermore, details of some crucial issues concerned by
enterprise, such as security, authorization, transaction, etc., are
not addressed.
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