TOWARDS GRID ENABLED INFORMATION RETRIEVAL Babak Akhgar, Nahum Korda, Jawed Siddiqi and Mehrdad Naderi Sheffield Hallam University School of Computing and Management Sciences Shefffield UK ABSTRACT Our research aims to further our understanding of Information Retrieval for management of knowledge within the Grid environment. We do so by developing a search and categorisation toolkit which utilises Grid services for IR. A novel grid enabled IR services based workflow model is proposed and detailed that describes the interaction and orchestration between core IR functionalities and Grid services. KEYWORDS Grid Technology, Information Retrieval, Workflow Model 1. INTRODUCTION The emergence of ‘grid computing’ technologies often carries much hype and high expectations; Shread [1] describes it as “…the fifth wave of the IT revolution” where, the fourth wave being that of the Internet. Certainly, the combined capability of the Internet and Grid technologies promises to change how complex problems are handled through enabling large-scale aggregation and sharing of computational, data, information, knowledge and other resources across institutional and geographical boundaries. Given the critical importance of data, information and knowledge as the key strategic resources within enterprises and Virtual Organisations (VO) Siddiqi and Akhgar [2] for the purposes of this paper we consider the concept of a VO as a logical entity for dynamic coordination and maintenance of Data, Information and Knowledge (DIK) between providers and consumers alike Akhgar et. al [3]. Research by, Kesselman, et al [4] and Allan and Hanlon [5] suggest that optimum execution of process of dynamic coordination and maintenance of DIK within the context of a VO requires self contained, self describing and discoverable set of services with pre-defined ontological structure which enact Information Retrieval (IR) processes (e.g. Querying and Personalisation) as stated in Akhgar and Siddiqi [6]. Examples for the partial realisation of these encapsulating an advanced KM services can be seen in the Globus Toolkit, and GEODISE portal [7]. Our current research aims to describe the key requirements for provision of knowledge management (KM) services within a Grid environment. In this paper we present a generic set of IR workflows necessary for realisation of knowledge services architectural design based on a canonical set of requirements for the development of KM services within a Grid environment obtained during requirements engineering and architectural design of GRACE project [3]. . GRACE is an EU funded project under "Information Society Technology Programme" FP5. The project aims to deliver GRID enabled Search and Categorisation Engine by making terabytes of information that already exists and is distributed on vast amounts of geographically distant locations highly accessible. Our focus and contribution in GRACE toolkit development is the identification, elaboration, validation and evaluation of the necessary grid enabled application technology to enable the next generation KM services based on IR principals to build upon core Grid services and focus on the design of KM technologies for knowledge workers, communities and organisations alike. 421