Gredia Middleware Architecture *

In this paper, we present RDLS (Rich Data Location Services), a grid middleware for data management designed to meet the requirements posed by the GREDIA project [1]. The main purpose of the described Middleware components is to provide the prerequisite services for storage, search and retrieval of annotated, rich media content in a large-scale distributed environment. These services can be efficiently integrated in existing Grid middlewares, such as Globus Toolkit 4 [5], to manipulate rich media content. The users of GREDIA platform will be able to upload their files in the distributed GREDIA repository and to perform advanced searches in the annotations of the stored content. A Peer-to-Peer overlay will be implemented to store the provided annotations. Every node connected to the platform will be able to act not only as a consumer of storage resources, by means of searching existent files, but also as a provider of storage capacity and data services.