Introduction

A Grimoire is a magician's manual for invoking demons (Oxford English Dictionary). Likewise, the GRIMOIRES registry hosts descriptions of services and workflows, which a scientist can use for forming their complex scientific experiments. However, service and workflow interfaces are sometimes underspecified and therefore difficult to use in an automated manner; hence, the GRIMOIRES registry provides the ability to augment interfaces with metadata such as functionality, semantic information about their inputs and outputs, or various metrics (e.g. perceived quality of service, trust).

In one sentence, GRIMOIRES is a UDDI-compatible Web Service registry with metadata annotation extensions.

GRIMOIRES is a UDDI-compatible web service registry with added capabilities including attaching metadata to UDDI entities and discovering entities based on metadata.

GRIMOIRES allows registering the technical interface of web service, which is usually in the form of WSDL. Registered WSDL can be annotated with metadata that conveys the semantic information about WSDL elements such as operations and messages. By doing so, GRIMOIRES supports discovering services by their semantic technical signature.

In GRIMOIRES, all information is represented in RDF triples, which forms a foundation for semantic discovery and ontology reasoning.

In addition, a WSRF-compatible interface in GRIMOIRES exposes registry entities and their metadata as WS-Resources, so that they can be queried over, updated, and subscribed for notification on changes, by using the standard operations defined in the WSRF specifications.

The GRIMOIRES registry released for Globus Toolkit 4 has the following components.

The registry itself and non-WSRF-compatible interfaces

It provides the following functionalities towards users:

• a UDDI Web Service interface,
• a WSDL Web Service interface that allows to publish and discover WSDL descriptions,
• a Metadata Web Service interface that allows to attach metadata to registry entities and discovery entities by their attached metadata,
• a RDF Web Service interface that allows to query in RDQL, a RDF query language, over the RDF triple store that acts as GRIMOIRES' backend,
• Lifetime management.

This component has the name Grimoires.

In its package, there is detailed documentation under the "doc/" directory. To be self-contained, this documentation also contains essential information on installing and using Grimoires.

The WSRF-compatible interfaces

This component exposes registry entities and their annotated metadata as Ws-Resource, so that they can be manipulated by using the standard operations defined in WSRF specifications, such as WS-ResourceProperties, WS-ResourceLifetime, WS-Notification.

This component has the name Grimoires-WSRF.

This paper gives a good presentation of Grimoires-WSRF.

The access controller

This component provides a unified approach towards the authentication and authorization purposes for all the interfaces implemented in both Grimoires and Grimoires-WSRF.

This component has the name Grimoires-GT4Authorization.

The client

A command-line user-friendly client is able to talk with Grimoires in both a secure and non-secure way.

This component has the name Grimoires-GT4SecureClient.

Naming Convention

 

• GRIMOIRES: the project as a whole, the research, the approach, etc.
• Grimoires: the component name. The component name forms a part of the package name.
• Grimoires-WSRF: the component name.
• Grimoires-GT4Authorization: the component name.
• Grimoires-GT4SecureClient: the component name.