Under the WEgrid Enterprise initiative, it is proposed that selected Grid technologies and Semantic Web technologies (so-called "Semantic Grid" technologies) will be used to implement the foundation of the World-Education-Grid. The following technologies are expected to play leading roles in the World-Education-Grid --
OGSA – Open Grid Service Architecture
"The Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) addresses the challenges of integrating services across distributed, heterogeneous, dynamic 'virtual organizations' formed from the disparate resources within a single enterprise and/or from external resource sharing and service provider relationships.
"Building on concepts and technologies from the Grid and Web services communities, this architecture defines a uniform exposed service semantics (the Grid service); defines standard mechanisms for creating, naming, and discovering transient Grid service instances; provides location transparency and multiple protocol bindings for service instances; and supports integration with underlying native platform facilities.
"The Open Grid Services Architecture also defines, in terms of Web Services Description Language (WSDL) interfaces and associated conventions, mechanisms required for creating and composing sophisticated distributed systems, including lifetime management, change management, and notification. Service bindings can support reliable invocation, authentication, authorization, and delegation, if required. It shows how Grid functionality can be incorporated into a Web services framework." ... See The Physiology of the Grid: An Open Grid Services Architecture for Distributed Systems
The Semantic Web is a vision for the future of the Web in which information is given explicit meaning, making it easier for machines to automatically process and integrate information available on the Web. The Semantic Web will build on XML's ability to define customized tagging schemes and RDF's flexible approach to representing data. It is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. The Semantic Web relates to how data is represented on the World Wide Web. It is a collaborative effort led by W3C with participation from a large number of researchers and industrial partners. It is based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF), which integrates a variety of applications using XML for syntax and URIs for naming.
OWL is a technology within the Semantic Web framework that extends the capabilities of RDF. It is intended to be used when the information contained in documents needs to be processed by applications, as opposed to situations where the content only needs to be presented to humans. OWL can be used to explicitly represent the meaning of terms in vocabularies and the relationships between those terms.