Tasmeia Yousaf
The need of integrating services and sharing data across distributed and heterogeneous entities is growing at a steady pace. Grid computing has emerged as a significant important research area, distinct from traditional distributed computing by focusing on resource sharing on large scale, and high performance orientation. Open Grid Service Architecture (OGSA) standardizes a set of core capabilities and behaviors that address key concerns in Grid systems. But this kind of infrastructure conceals the complexity of heterogeneous and distributed data sources, and handles the dynamics of the underlying networking environment.
Implementing a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) using Web services technologies enables a new way of building applications with a more powerful and flexible programming model. SOA provides ability to leverage existing assets, where the goal is to build a new architecture and integrate existing system that can be componentized.
Peer database management systems (PDBMSs) are an alternative data sharing approach, which favors a direct and dynamic node-to-node model of communication with no centralized control. We propose an Open Service Architecture (OSAP) for PDBMSs. This architecture inherits all the benefits of SOAs. As there is a clear need for either Grid or P2P data access or both, OSAP will conform to the latest technologies and standards.