Computing Seminar

Federated Information for Data GRIDS

Alex Gray, University of Cardiff

Abstract

The internet has raised awareness of the need for metadata which describes data held in information resources attached to networks so that the data can be used in federated environments. This is becoming more important with the advent of the high speed networks of the GRID which will enable disparate data to be linked for analytic purposes.

The talk will concentrate on the presenter's interest in metadata, which started in the early days of distributed databases and has persisted into its role in creating federated knowledge systems supporting different user's integration views for data in web environments where the data to be linked and fused can be held in structured and unstructured collections. This will lead to the evolving role of metadata in the future GRID technologies covering its role in data quality ensurance, data curation and secondary analysis.

About the speaker: Alex Gray is Professor of Advanced Information Systems at Cardiff University. He leads the OKS (Object and Knowledge Based Systems) research group in the Department of Computer Science. He is a member of many conference programme committees such as VLDB, ICDE, EDBT, BNCOD, etc. and has published more than 150 papers on distributed database systems, distributed information systems, and knowledge based systems. He holds a number of current grants in the areas of interoperability of information systems from EC, EPSRC, BBSRC and other funding bodies. His recent work has been concerned with building federated knowledge based systems for biodiversity information systems and engineering information systems. Another major interest is the distributed support of design systems for concurrent engineering. He is involved in the recently announced Cardiff Regional GRID centre funded by the DTI and EPSRC. In this centre he will be looking at how metadata can be used to improve the handling of data used in experimentation in the science world. Two recent grants are concerned with handling data for magnetic wave experimentation in a grid environment and the creation of a grid biodiversity demonstrator.