Development of a Grid Enabled Occupational Data Environment

Abstract

The GEODE project is developing user-oriented Grid-based services, accessible via a portal, for social scientists who require and use 'occupational information' within their research. There are many complexities associated with social scientists’ use of data on individual occupations. These arise for example from the availability of numerous alternative occupational classifications, and the use of different occupational definitions across countries. This paper describes how the GEODE project is developing an online service which acts as a facility supporting access to numerous occupational information resources. This is achieved through an integrated Grid service which uses a Globus Toolkit 4 infrastructure and OGSA-DAI (Database Access and Integration) middleware to provide the necessary data indexing and matching services, accessed through a user-oriented front-end portal (using GridSphere). The paper discusses issues in the implementation and organization of these services.