The key objective of the project is to develop an interdisciplinary data location and integration service for space sciences. The service will collect responses from various resources and integrate them in a seamless fashion for display and manipulation by the user.
Profiles map generic concepts and terms onto mission or dataset specific attributes.
Users may make general queries across multiple disciplines by using the generic terms of the highest level profile, or make more specific queries within subdisciplines using terms from more detailed subprofiles. The resource, query, and response profiles are all aspects of a common database of resource attributes. The profile concept is critical to a distributed data service where one cannot expect data providers to modify their internal systems or services to accommodate some externally imposed standard. The profiles act as a thin, lightweight interface between the distributed service and the existing specific services. Ideally the service-specific profile implementations are maintained in a fully distributed fashion, with each data or service provider running a GLU daemon in which that site's services are fully described and updated as necessary.