Requirements of an e-science infrastructure interoperability reference model

Many production Grid and e-science infrastructures offer their broad range of resources via services to end-users during the past several years with an increasing number of scientific applications that require access to a wide variety of resources and services in multiple Grids. But the vision of world-wide federated Grid infrastructures in analogy to the electrical power Grid is still not seamlessly provided today. This is partly due to the fact, that Grids provide a much more variety of services (job management, data management, information, security, etc.) in comparison with the electrical power Grid, but also we observe a rather slow adoption of the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) concept initially defined as the major Grid reference model architecture roughly one decade ago. This contribution critically reviews OGSA and other related reference models in the field while pointing to significant requirements of an e-science infrastructure interoperability reference model that satisfies the needs of end-users today. We give insights to our findings of the core factors of such reference model requirements including its important major indicators to overcome the known limitations of OGSA. We then compare OGSA and the identified factors with our approach to give evidence for its applicability, relevance, and impact in European production infrastructures today.