Developing a Grid-based search and categorization tool

Grid technology has the potential to improve the accessibility of digital libraries. The participants in Project GRACE (Grid Search And Categorization Engine) are in the process of developing a search engine that will allow users to search through heterogeneous resources stored in geographically distributed digital collections. What differentiates this project from current search tools is that GRACE will be run on the European Data Grid, a large distributed network, and will not have a single centralized index as current web search engines do. In some cases, the distributed approach offers advantages over the centralized approach since it is more scalable, can be used on otherwise inaccessible material, and can provide advanced search options customized for each data source.