The web site contains copies of all working drafts, lists of working group participants, and lists of current working group activities. The Data Access Working Group of the Grid Forum is promoting the development of standard implementation practices for the construction of data grids. Data grids are inherently distributed systems that tie together data and compute resources.
Researchers rely on the data grid to support all aspects of data access and data manipulation.
Examples include data set name transparency, data location transparency, access protocol transparency, latency hiding or data access optimization, and authentication transparency or single sign-on systems. The Data Access working group will seek common implementation practices for creating data handling systems. One of the first tasks is to identify the core functionality needed within a data handling system. Given the identification of a desired data set, a data handling system manages interactions with the possibly remote data set. Protocol transparency - Data grids provide access to heterogeneous data resources, including file systems, databases, and archives.