Application Research On Semantic Grid Portals

Along with the rapid the development of science and technology, especially that of computer network and information technology, the environment and process of scientific research have changed greatly. Due to the unprecedented complexity of current research problems, acquiring the information needed and processing of data in scientific research becomes more and more important. Scientists also need to communicate and cooperate much closer with each other in order to gain better results in analysis, discovery, and forecast. Under this background, e-Science technology emerged and it has given powerful support for researchers to acquire information needed from a voluminous information spaces, to achieve collaborative research, share knowledge and resource, and to create knowledge collaboratedly.The main work of the thesis is based on DrSNPGrid project, which is carried out by department of Biomedical Engineering and department of Computer Science and Engineering of Southeast University. The project's goal is, through combining Grid computing and Semantic Web technologies together, to construct an e-Science environment for Biomedical researchers, to enable them to share distributed data, information resources conveniently so that they can acquire useful knowledge from these resources to direct researches on relationships between Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) and diseases, and to enable them to carry out biochips experiments collaboratedlly to uncover these relationships as well.A Grid portal is a Web-based user environments for Grid applications, and the portal takes an important role in DrSNPGrid system. The author of the paper undertook the research and development works of DrSNPGrid portal, including early investigation, researches on information retrieval mechanism and personalization mechnism for a semantic Grid portal, overall design, and implementation of a prototype system. The main content of the dissertation are as follows.Firstly, concepts and evolvement of common portals are discussed, then the signification of Grid portal is analyzed, and research fruits and technical line in area of Grid portals in recent years are summarized, especially, the service-oriented architecture for Grid portals combined with portlet technology is studied and analyzed amply, on the base of which the framework of DrSNPGrid portal is designed.To facilitate users acquiring useful knowledge to filter SNPs, and then carrying out corresponding biochips experiments to uncover relationships between SNPs and diseases, DrSNPGrid system extracts and integrates information from heterogeneous sources in the Grid to construct an ontological, consistent Knowledge Base (KB). Therefor, how to apply Semantic Web technologies into the portal to facilitate users browsing and querying in such KB becomes our big research issue, and an ontology-driven information retrieval mechanism considering both browse and query is brought forward. Our browse mechanism not only enables users to locate interested information with ontological knowledge, to navigate from one piece of information to another based on semantic associations, but also enables users to access information according to the cumulative effects of browse history by tracking the corresponded path in the conceptual space at every browse step. And our query mechanism provides a novel graphical query interface to facilitate users formulating ontology-based queries without having to learn declarative ontology query languages. It can also capture users'query requirements about complex semantic relationships to some extent. However, this mechanism can be applied to common semantic information portals.Personalization is one of basic characters of portals. Therefor, the issues of personalization in Grid portals are discussed all sidedly, and various personalization services are designed for different requirements. Especially, for user's personalization requirement of information retrieval in KB, an...