This document is under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-ND Creative Commons Attribution A Grid Middleware for Ontology Access

Many advanced grid applications need access to ontologies representing knowledge about a certain application domain. To deal with the high heterogeneity of available ontologies, we propose a general service-oriented middleware for making ontologies accessible to grid applications. Our implementation is integrated in the German D-Grid infrastructure and provides several applications a uniform access to biomedical ontologies such as Gene Ontology, NCI Thesaurus and several OBO ontologies.