A framework for supporting bottom-up ontology evolution for discovery and description of Grid services Sunjae Lee a , Wonchul Seo a , Dongwoo Kang a , Kwangsoo Kim a, * , Jae Yeol Lee b,1 a Department of Industrial and Management Engineering, Pohang University of Science and Technology, San 31, Hyoja-dong, Namgu, Pohang 790-784, South Korea b Department of Industrial Engineering, Chonnam National University, Gwangju, South Korea Abstract The problem of service sharing in a Grid environment arises from the heterogeneity of ontologies. The discovery and description of Grid services based on the heterogeneous ontologies might give rise to misunderstanding of the contents. In order to reduce and ulti- mately to remove the misunderstanding, a domain-specific ontology should be shared among concerned parties, and the abilities of Grid services should be discovered and described based on that shared ontology. However, since the ontology evolves as time goes by, the shared ontology for the Grid services should have a flexible infrastructure that has an ability to reflect the changes in ontologies. This paper proposes a flexible ontology management approach for discovery and description of Grid service capabilities supporting ontology evolution whose goal is to enhance the interoperability among Grid services. In this approach, concepts and descriptions in an ontology are defined independently, and they are connected by relationships. In addition, the relationships are updated based on real-time eval- uations of ontology users in order to flexibly support ontology evolution. A bottom-up ontology evolution means such environment that allows ontology users to evaluate impact factors of concepts in an ontology and that results of the evaluation are reflected to the mod- ification of the ontology. The contribution of this paper is to suggest the ontology management framework that not only enables seman- tic discovery and description of a Grid service capability but also supports a bottom-up ontology evolution based on the users’ evaluations. Ó 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Semantic discovery and description of Grid services; Ontology evolution; Ontology management framework 1. Introduction In the mid 1990s, the term the Grid was proposed to denote a distributed computing infrastructure for advanced science and engineering (Foster, Kesselman, & Tuecke, 2001). The term Grid Computing refers to a computational paradigm based on an infrastructure that enables the inte- grated, collaborative use of high-end computers, networks, databases, and scientific instruments owned and managed by multiple organizations (Aloisio & Talia, 2002). Grid computing supplies computing and data resources over the Internet seamlessly, transparently and dynamically according to the needs, just as the power Grid supplies elec- tricity to end users (Ludwig & Reyhani, in press). Based on the concepts of Web Services, the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) brings forward a concept of Grid Service, which is used to solve problems related to temporary services as service detection, dynamic service creation and service lifetime management (Wang, Liu, Luo, Wang, & Xu, 2004). In this architecture, a Grid is regarded as an extensible set of Grid services that may be aggregated in various ways to meet the needs of Virtual Organizations (VOs), which themselves can be defined in part by the ser- vices that they operate and share (Foster, Kesselman, Nick, & Tuecke, 2002). Three distinguished features of the Grid 0957-4174/$ - see front matter Ó 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2005.11.036 * Corresponding author. Tel.: +82 54 279 2195; fax: +82 54 279 5998. E-mail addresses: supersun@postech.ac.kr (S. Lee), wcseo@postech. ac.kr (W. Seo), hyunil@postech.ac.kr (D. Kang), kskim@postech.ac.kr (K. Kim), jaeyeol@chonnam.ac.kr (J.Y. Lee). 1 Tel.: +82 62 530 1782. www.elsevier.com/locate/eswa Expert Systems with Applications 32 (2007) 376–385 Expert Systems with Applications