The GRelC Project: state of the art and future directions

Grids encourage and promote the publication, sharing and integration of scientific data, distributed across Virtual Organizations. Scientists and researchers work on huge, complex and growing datasets. The complexity of data management within a grid environment comes from the distribution, heterogeneity and number of data sources. Along with coarse grained services (basically grid storages, replica services, storage resource managers, etc.), there is a strong interest on fine grained ones concerning, for instance, grid-database access and management. Moreover, as grid computing, technologies and standards evolve, more mature environments (production grids such as EGEE) become available for production based activities and tools/services able to access in grid relational databases are also strongly required. We describe the Grid Relational Catalog (GRelC) Project, a framework for grid data management, highlighting its approach, architecture, components, services and technological issues.