Advances in the GRelC Data Access Service

In a growing number of scientific disciplines, large data collections are emerging as important community resources. Data and metadata management exploiting the data grid paradigm is becoming more and more important as the number of involved data sources is continuously increasing and decentralizing. Efficient grid data access services are perceived as mandatory components for data management. In the grid data management area the GRelC Project has been addressing efficiency, transparency, interoperability and security issues, providing grid enabled solutions and proposing a set of data access and integration/federation services. In this paper we present the advances related to the GRelC Data Access, highlighting differences and innovations w.r.t. previous work. Basic foundations about the grid-enabled queries provided by the GRelC DAS and experimental results related to a bioinformatics international testbed on the GILDA t-Infrastructure are also reported and discussed.