E-infrastructure and e-science

Abstract

The digital world of the Grid meets the physical world through a variety of sensors, instruments, and interfaces. These two significant trends in computing technology-more devices around us, more integration and power behind the scenes-have a symbiotic relationship. Grid applications, as exemplified by many projects in the UK e-Science program, have increasingly become aware of the need to focus on this digital-physical interface of the Grid, and the pervasive and ubiquitous computing community is looking towards the Grid for aspects of processing, data handling, integration, and access. Meanwhile there is also interest in applying middleware techniques across these distributed computing domains. Both trends stand to benefit from a third significant movement in computing-the move towards machine-processable explicit knowledge as in the Semantic Web. This enables the automation and interoperability, which is increasingly necessary in these open, distributed systems and is essential to realize their full ambitions. This is illustrated through the adoption of Semantic Web technologies within the practice of Grid computing, a field of endeavor known as Semantic Grid (De Roure et al. 2005)]. These technologies are also being adopted within pervasive computing, for example in representing context information and device ontologies. Significantly, they also facilitate a capability for automated inference-an aspect of "intelligent" behavior. Ambient Intelligence is more than the notion of pervasive computing, i.e., devices everywhere-it is the notion of intelligence in the surrounding environment supporting the activities and interactions of the users. It is the Grid technologies, and indeed the Semantic Grid, which shift us from sets of deployed devices into a genuine AmI environment. Ambient Intelligence is the meeting of the Semantic Grid and the physical world. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.