Semantic Support for Grid-Enabled Design Search in Engineering

Semantic Web technologies are evolving the Grid towards the Semantic Grid [2] to yield an intelligent grid which allows seamless process automation, easy knowledge reuse and collaboration within a community of practice. We discuss our endeavours in this direction in the context of Grid enabled optimisation and design search in engineering (“Geodise” project) [3]. In our work we have developed a semantics-based Grid-enabled computing architecture for Geodise. The architecture incorporates a service-oriented distributed knowledge management framework for providing various semantic and knowledge support. It uses ontologies as the conceptual backbone for information-level and knowledge-level computation. We also describe ontological engineering work and a service-oriented approach to ontology deployment. We present several application examples that show the benefit of semantic support in Geodise.