The purpose of this group is to coordinate a set of interoperation efforts among production Grids interested in interoperating in support of applications that require resources in multiple Grids.

The RISGE-RG explores issues related to the exploitation of Grid technologies for conducting and monitoring measurement tasks and experiments on complex remote scientific equipment. The main purpose of this research group will be to bring together various existing approaches in defining remote access interfaces to sophisticated laboratory equipment, as well as to come up with use cases that can dictate the requirements for integrating scientific instruments with the Grid. As such, it concerns mostly the steering and monitoring of instrument resources, although more typical problems such as user access and authorization are also in scope. The advances of Grid technologies in areas such as interactivity, visualization and Quality of Service provisioning will play an important role in accessing remote devices, therefore the description of suitable service-level terms is highly relevant. One of the purposes of this group is to bring together people involved in the field of remote instrumentation to document experiences, identify best practices and develop informational documents which can be fed to the Working Groups researching the area of digital contracts (Service Level Agreements) and guarantees on the Grid. This forum can be used in order to discuss problems encountered by the relevant user groups, both technical and non-technical.

The GIR RG is focused on search functionality based on computational grids. Search, also known as information retrieval, is a data-intensive activity intended to match documents (of all types) to human information needs.

The Preservation Environments Research Group of the Grid Forum will develop a GGF Informational Document for Persistent Archives based on virtual data grid technology.The proposed Information Document will serve two purposes: 1) Describe to the preservation community best practices for implementing distributed preservation systems 2) Identify for the grid community the consistency constraints that are required between grid services for a viable preservation system.

The purpose of this group is to identify key technical requirements and common approaches to enterprise grid computing.

The Storage Networking Community Group (SNCG) is for vendors and users who are interested in and/or are already involved in providing or leveraging data storage resources in/for Grid systems; as well as, to share experiences and set priorities around Storage Networking.

This group focuses on how network providers and the Grid community can seek to create common approaches in dealing with significant changes in the offering of services and applications, as well as using infrastructure that will support grids and their evolution. It will seek advice and opinions from customers, network providers, network equipment vendors, Grid middleware and applications vendors and technologists.

This group will develop an API specification for the submission and control of jobs to one or more Distributed Resource Management (DRM) systems. The scope of this specification is all the high level functionality which is necessary for an application to consign a job to a DRM system including common operations on jobs like termination or suspension.

This Working Group will produce an OGF Recommendation for a grid-enabled, remote procedure call (RPC) mechanism. The first document entitled A GridRPC Model and API for End-User Applications has been completed and published as GFD-R.52. Currently we are concentrating on the second recommendation document, which defines GridRPC API for middleware developers that extends the model and GridRPC API for end-users, and also focuses on data management mechanism within the GridRPC model. The GridRPC middleware tools developed will further lower the barrier to acceptance for grid use by hiding the tremendous amount of infrastructure necessary to make grids work, while providing even higher-level abstractions for domain-specific middleware.

This working group is the first working group spawned by the SAGA-RG, and will concentrate on defining a concrete API for the functional areas identified by the initial SAGA-RG design team: - Files - Logical files - Job submission and management - Streaming communication between processes along with the core API areas which are independent of specific Grid operations: - Tasks - Sessions - Security

The objective of this working group is to work on two specifications (RNS and WSNR) to realize a three level name space for OGSA and to produce WS-Naming naming specification based on WS-Addressing. Thus, both RNS and WS-Naming must be combinable with OGSA Basic Profile.

The Open Grid Forum (OGF) has embraced the Open Grid Services Architecture as the blueprint for standards-based grid computing. 'Open' refers to the process used to develop standards that achieve interoperability. 'Grid' is concerned with the integration, virtualization, and management of services and resources in a distributed, heterogeneous environment. It is 'service-oriented' because it delivers functionality as loosely coupled, interacting services aligned with industry-accepted Web service standards. The 'architecture' defines the components, their organizations and interactions, and the design philosophy used. OGSA-WG is developing the architecture and its constituent specifications and profiles in collaboration with a number of fellow working groups.

The objective of this working group is to formulate a well-defined set of profiles, and additional specifications if needed, for job and data management that are aligned with a Grid security and information model that addresses the needs of production grid infrastructures.

In order to ensure that we share a common language when describing grids, what they are comprised of, how those entities interact and so forth, we need an agreed upon glossary and set of terms. When defining standards, protocols and interfaces for grid computing, the sets of components (both services and resources) that comprise a grid, their relationships and their life-cycles need to be more formally described. Providing this formal description and associated terminology is the goal of the Reference Model working group. Whilst extant standards capture aspects of what is required, they are either incomplete or lack a Grid context and so need to be pulled together into a coherent whole. It is not the purpose of this group to replicate the work of established standards that in general meet our needs. Rather the work of this group will be to pragmatically develop the broader model that brings together, references and extends where appropriate.

The goal of the GRAAP Working Group is to produce a set of specifications and supporting documents which describe methods and means to establish Service Level Agreements between different entities in a distributed environment. The WS-Agreement Specification V1.0, a Web Services protocol to establish agreements between two services, has recently (May 2007) been published as an OGF Proposed Recommendation (see GFD.107). Currently, the groups focuses on negotition and renegotiation of SLAs using WS-Agreement negotiato and usage scenarios.

The goal of the Grid Scheduling Architecture Research Group (GSA-RG) is to define a scheduling architecture that supports cooperation between different scheduling instances for arbitrary Grid resources. The group currently focuses on the interoperation of different schedulers in an OGF-complaint ecosystem.

The objective of this working group is to work on the profile and specifications needed to realize the vertical use case of batch job scheduling of scientific/technical applications. This use case is often referred to as the "core" high performance computing (HPC) use case.

The JSDL-WG has produced a language that describes the requirements of jobs for submission to Grids. JSDL 1.0 (published as GGF recommendation GFD-R-P.056 [http://www.ggf.org/documents/GFD.56.pdf]) is an XML-based language that focuses mainly on computational jobs. The JSDL-WG is working on extending this language to address a wider class of jobs.

The objective of the OGSA-BES working group is to focus on a minimal sub-set of the EMS services and develop a recommendations document (i.e., specification) for them.

The OGSA-RSS-WG defines protocols for the scheduling functionality within the OGSA framework.

The aim of this working group is to define an XML-based language, the Data Format Description Language (DFDL), for describing the structure of binary and textual files and data streams so that their format, structure, and metadata can be exposed.

Research and development activities relating to the grid have generally focused on applications where data is stored in files. However, in many scientific and commercial domains, database management systems have a central role in data storage, access, organisation, authorisation, etc, for numerous applications. The group is developing standards for grid data services, focusing principally on providing consistent access to existing, autonomously managed databases from web services. By focusing on services, the intention is to ease application development through the provision of composable components. The group does not seek to develop new data storage systems, but rather to make such systems more readily usable individually or collectively within a grid framework.

The goal of the Digital Repositories Research Group (DR-RG) is to analyze how digital repositories can be built on top of federated storage infrastructure, focusing on the exploitation of existing data-related standards and the identification of need for new or revised data-related standards.

GFS-WG works on standard service interface(s) and architecture of a logical file system that can be used in data grid management systems for both inter and intra enterprise grid environments. This group also collaborates with the SNIA ILM and other similar efforts in the industry.

In this Working Group we will focus on the definition of the functionality of a standard SRM (Storage Resource Manager) interface. We define Storage Resource Managers (SRMs) as middleware components whose function is to provide dynamic space allocation and file management of shared storage components on the Grid. We see this as a short-term effort to have a workable interface that Grid projects could immediately make use of to resolve interoperability issues between storage systems.

This group focuses on improvements of FTP and GridFTP v1.0 protocol with the goal to produce bulk file transfer protocol suitable for grid applications. New protocols should be backward compatible with RFC959 FTP as much as possible with new features added as (negotiable) extensions. Some desired extensions are: parallel transfers, GSI authentication, and striped transfers.

The purpose of this group is to develop a model for Information Dissemination to support the timely delivery of valuable information, and to develop one or more specifications backed up by appropriate use cases

The objective of the OGSA ByteIO working group is to define a minimal Web Service interface for providing "POSIX-like" file functionality. Essentially this allows any service which implements the interface to be accessed in a file-like way. The WG will produce a use case informational document, a recommendation document and an experience document.

The OGSA DMI Working Group tackles the problems of discovering of data transport protocols available at the data's source and destination location and agreeing on one of them, and the actual invocation of the agreed data movement. This includes direct data movements and 3rd party data movements. The OGSA DMI Working Group, though clearly associated to its roots with the OGSA Working Group, aims to define a set of interfaces that is independent of the "umbrella use case" of Grid Applications so that it can be used in scenarios and deployments other than the Grid.

Grid Computing expounds the vision of applications having on-demand, ubiquitous access to distributed services running on diverse, managed resources like computation, storage, instruments, and networks among others, that are owned by multiple administrators. As grids move towards forming dynamic, seamless Virtual Organizations (VOs) using distributed resources, they require application driven transport privileges from the network. Pre-existing security policies within the network such as in firewalls, network address translators, application level gateways, VPN style gateways etc. tend to interfere with these new applications and the VO formation, and usually require an administrator/manual intervention to work. The Firewall Issues research group (fi-rg) has documented the use cases and classified the issues that Grid applications experience when trying to traverse and/or control data transport policy enforcement devices (GFD.83). The group is also in process of publishing a document that analyzes and categorizes new firewall protocols, architectures and on-demand frameworks. This working group will leverage the application requirements from the FI-RG to standardize a set of service definitions for a virtualized control interface into firewalls and other midboxes allowing the grid applications to securely and dynamically request application/workflow-specific services from those devices, for the duration of the service.

The Grid High-Performance Networking Research Group focuses on the relationship between network research and Grid application and infrastructure development. Two specific goals of the GHPN-RG are identifying a) grid application requirements and implementations that are not supported or understood by the networking community and b) advanced networking features that are not being utilized by grid applications.

The purpose of the Network Mark-up Language Working Group is to combine efforts of multiple projects to describe network topologies, so that the outcome is a standardised network description ontology and schema, facilitating interoperability between different projects.

Generation and exchange of network measurements is critical for all networked environments, and in particular advanced environments like the Grid. The schemata for network metrics that have been defined in the OGF’s Network Measurement Working Group (NM-WG) have spawned a vibrant community among R&E network operators who have been developing and deploying an infrastructure called perfSONAR. The perfSONAR effort began in September 2004 in a series of meetings in and around GGF-12 in Brussels, Belgium. The perfSONAR consortium has begun to produce a series of protocol documents describing the messaging functionality in that system and the NMC group will house the formalization of those standards within the OGF.

The performance of most grid applications is dependent on the performance of the networks forming the grid. The Network Measurements Working Group (NMWG) identifies network metrics (aka characteristics) useful to grid applications and middleware, and develops standard mechanisms to describe and publish these characteristics to the Grid.

High performance networks offer advanced network services to end users with differing requirements. The user/application/middleware may request network services from one or more network service providers through a network service interface. The network service setup then requires configuration, monitoring and orchestration of network resources under particular agreements and policies. Provisioning mechanisms support allocating, configuring, and maintaining network internal resources. The Network Service Interface (NSI) Working Group (WG) will provide the recommendation for a generic network service interface that can be called by a network external entity such as end users, middleware, and other network service providers. The recommendation will define the information exchange, the required messages and protocols, operational environment, and other relevant aspects. The scope of the NSI WG includes, in particular, the interface between Grid middleware and the network infrastructure as well as the interface between network domains in order to provide interoperability in a heterogeneous multi-domain environment. The WG will consider user authentication/authorization, service negotiation agreements, and information exchange to describe advanced network services.

The purpose of this group is the creation of a practical solution to interface with Cloud infrastructures exposed as a service (IaaS). We will focus on a solution which covers the provisioning, monitoring and definition of Cloud Infrastructure services. The group should create this API in an agile way as we can have advantages over other groups if we deliver fast. Overlapping work and efforts will be contributed and synchronized with other groups.

The scope of SCRM centers around the standards associated with the management of resources used in a network or individually, by means of structured data standards. Individual experts from participating SDOs are pursuing a first deliverable - a "landscape document" designed to provide information regarding the definitions, taxonomy and interplay of the various specifications of each respective organization.

This working group is spawned by RISGE-RG and will focus its effort on providing a Shared Information Model (SIM) and defining concrete interfaces for accessing remote instruments. There is a need in the community for accessing remote instruments by using standard interfaces that are well defined and specified by standard approaches/procedures. The main purpose of this working group will be to standardize approaches in remote access interfaces to instruments through our SIM. Target devices are all kind of instruments including distributed sensor networks. As such, it concerns mostly the services for steering and monitoring instrument resources, granting security and authorization (policy), accessing combined or multiple devices, performing a calibration phase, and also services for acquiring data from instruments ,operating on files and streams.

The GLUE Working Group will provide a recommendation for an abstract information model which is expressed via a schema independent of information system implementations. The schema will define the set of attributes and attribute semantics, the relationship between the attributes and the syntax for attribute values where applicable.

The purpose of this group is to define a Resource Usage Service (RUS) for deployment within an OGSA hosting environment that will track resource usage (accounting in the traditional UNIX sense), but will not concern itself with payment for the use of the resource.

In order for resources to be shared, sites must be able to exchange basic accounting and usage data in a common format. This working group proposes to define a common usage record based on those in current practice.

The purpose of the Certificate Authority Operations (CAOPS) Working Group is to develop operational procedures and guidelines that facilitate the use of X.509 and other technologies for cross grid Authentication.

The research group will first document the type of issues that Grid applications experience when the need arises to control data transport policy enforcement devices. Once the types of issues have been identified, the group will relate these issues to specific categories of enforcement devices.

The LoA Research Group (LoA-RG) is aimed at investigating use case scenarios in the e-Science/Grid contexts, and identifying gaps in applying existing LoA definitions to such contexts. Robust authentication and authorisation services are keys to the deployment of a secure virtual organisational (VO) environment where students, researchers, staff with different roles and responsibilities from different institutions are expected to share resources distributed in the Internet environment with components administered locally and independently. Authentication is the first line of defence in any secure systems, and it is particularly important in VO environments playing a critical role in the provision of a number of essential security services including authorisation, auditing and accounting.

The objective of the OGSA Authorization WG is to define the specifications needed to allow for basic interoperability and plug-ability of authorization components in the OGSA framework.