Being the organisers, the European Commission (EC) took the opportunity to introduce the topic. Two groups within the EC are involved. One is the Luxembourg based unit "Knowledge Management and Content creation", the other the Brussels based unit on "Grid Technologies". The representative from Luxembourg, Brian Macklin, arrived too late for the beginning of the meeting. His flight was cancelled, and it is a long drive by car from Luxembourg to The Hague.

Hence Vincent Obozinski from the Brussels unit gave both introductions. The Luxembourg unit, with the mission to develop semantic bases and context-aware systems, currently manages 33 projects with a funding budget of 130 million. By the end of FP6 his is expected to be around 60 projects and 250 million euro. A current focus is knowledge acquisition, sharing and exploring. Adding semantics to all types of processes, systems, data, etc.

The Brussels Grid unit currently manages 12 projects with 50 million euro funding. At the end of FP6 they expect to fund 30 projects with 125 million funding. The current focus is on Grid foundations and on Grid-enabling applications/services for business and society

The Semantic Web is a vision that is actively pursued by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Dieter Fensel reminded that the success of the World Wide Web was due to simplicity. Basically, three standards are involved: URI's, HTTP, and HTML. The resulting web, however, is static and more designed for being used by persons than being processed by systems. Despite its success, Fensel foresees some serious difficulties in the future for the web.

The Semantic Web effort is aimed at making the web more machine-processable by introducing ontologies. An Ontology is a standard description of the knowledge in a specific area. The ontology language OWL , based on RDF and XML has been designed for this purpose.

Web services are the set of technologies that will provide the basic infrastructure. Standards here are UDDI, WSDL, and SOA. Web services connect computers and devices.

In Fensel's view, Grid Computing is about sharing information and process capacity on Grid resources. Grid and the web have merged but only at the syntactical level. This should evolve to semantic web services. These will provide a conceptual model.

It requires more than aligning slogans for the Semantic Web and the Grid to merge, says Fensel. One has to build and develop compatible languages and systems, and he hopes the Grid community can provide the applications that the semantic web services need.

In the next presentation David De Roure, talked about the Semantic Grid. In his view, the Semantic Grid is the expansion of the current Grid to an infrastructure in which information and services are given well-defined meaning.

He sees several differences between Grid services and Web services. This includes a different approach to resource definitions and lifetime management, monitoring interfacing and notification.

The two communities each have their "own" main standardisation organisation. The Global Grid Forum (GGF) for the Grid and W3C for the semantic web.

A main difference between the two is that The Grid is driven by application pull, De Roure said, while the semantic web is driven by technology push.

One of the new projects De Roure is involved in is called OntoGrid. One of the objectives is to see what can and cannot be done with OWL and pushing semantics into the Grid structure.

In the short term OntoGrid is looking to grid resources and job description, semantic web services (OWL-S, WSMO), standards and use cases.

Web sites

Official report on the ( The Semantic Grid: when the Semantic Web meets the Grid

Semantic Grid portal maintained by De Roure. It includes his presentation slides.