Management of evolving semantic grid metadata within a collaborative platform

Grid environments, providing distributed infrastructures, computing resources and data storage, usually show a high degree of heterogeneity and change in their metadata. We propose a platform for collaborative management and maintenance of common metadata for grids. As the conceptual foundation of this platform, a meta model is presented which distinguishes structured descriptions and classification structures that both are modifiable. On this basis, the system allows for the creation and editing of grid relevant metadata and provides various search and navigation facilities for grid participants. We applied the platform to the German D-Grid initiative by establishing the D-Grid Ontology (DGO).