Recent developments in Grid Computing, the World-Wide Web, and Global Computing are turning the Internet into a network-centric computing infrastructure whose scope, scale, and user-base grow at an impressive pace. As this infrastructure moves into the mainstream of scientific and technological activity, it becomes the prevalent medium for scientific work, for multi-disciplinary scientific collaboration, and for decision support in an ever-increasing number of scientific, engineering, and societal sectors. In this context, enormous amounts of data are being generated and stored, creating a "deep Web" of data and metadata. Consequently, the management of data is becoming a major challenge for the successful operation and use, and the continuous growth of the infrastructure. In particular, searching appears as an indispensable tool for discovering information and knowledge regarding available resources, capabilities, services, and data.
The successful paradigm of searching for textual information on the Web cannot be applied directly to support searching within the "deep Web." Therefore, the searching problem needs to be addressed in a different context, and search needs to become an integral part of future infrastructures. In the SEARCHiN project (SEARCHing In a Networked world), we plan to combine methods from parallel and distributed computing, meta-data management, information retrieval, and the semantic Web in order to achieve the scientific and technological advances necessary to bring the simplicity and effectiveness of Web search right at the core of future global, network-centric computing systems.
Host institution: The project is operated by the High-Performance Computing Systems Laboratory (HPCL) of the Computer Science Department at the University of Cyprus. The Laboratory is a member of the CoreGRID European Research Network of Excellence in Grid and Peer-to-Peer Technologies and operates the Cypriot node of the EGEE Grid infrastructure. More information on HPCL can be found under http://grid.ucy.ac.cy.
The other partners in the SEARCHiN program are the University of Athens, Greece (Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, Dr. Yannis Ioannidis, http://www.di.uoa.gr) and the University of Manchester, UK (School of Computer Science, Dr. Rizos Sakellariou, http://www.cs.man.ac.uk)