SDR: A Semantic Based Distributed Repository for Simulation Models and Resources

Recent advances in Internet, peer-to-peer and grid technologies have made collaboration and resource sharing across organizational boundaries more feasible. Today, it is essential for many organizations to be able to discover, share and manage distributed resources in a transparent, meaningful and secure way. A fundamental problem is locating, matching and composing resources or services of interest. In this paper we describe our initial work designing and developing a semantic based distributed repository for secure sharing of simulation models, components and related resources such as computer resources. We propose an overlay architecture which combines advances in semantic Web, peer-to-peer and grid techniques. In our project at the Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI) we had a need for a repository of simulation related resources and having identified our requirements we found that there was no suitable of-the-shelf system available. We describe the design, tools and a prototype implementation of this system - the semantic based distributed repository (SDR) and conclude with our experiences and some raised issues. We argue that although some of the used techniques still are a bit immature and need further improvements a system like the SDR has a lot of potential and can also be used in other domains than modeling and simulation