Enterprise Software Grid: A Business Grid Service Ontology

Grid services have come to represent the synthesis of web services and grid computing paradigms. Web services provide the means to modularize software is a way that supports their description, discovery and synthesis. Grid computing removes the binding between functional components and specific hardware, enabling software to be deployed dynamically over a network (e.g. intra-, extraor inter-net). Representation of web service software has tended to be syntactic, lacking fundamental semantic underpinning. Grid services re-enforce the need to address the lack of semantics and enable a commercial semantic grid. The contribution of this paper is the development of a business grid service upper ontology. An upper service ontology that enables business grid services to be described and then related to the grid hosting platform. Tacit knowledge underlying service description and messaging are uncovered. The ontology is derived from and validated using a collection of web services taken from leading investment banks.