I won’t be at OGF20 (attending W3C’s WWW 2007 instead) but my manager, Tony Hey, will be there. He will be delivering one of the two keynotes. His working title is “The Social Grid” and this is the abstract:

The community has been making rapid progress in defining interoperable protocols for Grid computing. We now have a Web Services-based infrastructure to manage and operate compute-related Grids. However, we should not stand still; we should be looking at our next challenge and make use of the technological advances that are taking place on the Web. In recent years, the Web has evolved to an ecosystem of data and services where users are equally consumers and producers of information. It is no longer just a distributed infrastructure for the delivery of information but, rather, a planet-wide distributed application platform. It is interesting to observe that most of the contemporary needs of Grid computing can be met by the Web and its related technologies. Grid applications could be built using simple, well-supported, mature middleware making use of the Web’s infrastructure and protocols.

This talk will make the case for future Web-based Grids that will enable the effortless composition/integration of applications and services, promote scientific collaboration through social networking, and incorporate knowledge management/representation through semantic technologies. Given that technical computing and scientific research depend on the management of huge amounts of data and cross-organization collaboration, more now than any other time, the Web may provide some of the solutions the community needs.

I hope that a whitepaper, co-authored by community luminaries, would also be ready in time for Tony‘s talk, emphasizing the need to pay more attention on the Web, its architecture and technologies when it comes to Grid computing.