Towards a universal client for grid monitoring systems: design and implementation of the Ovid browser

In this paper, we present the design and implementation of Ovid, a browser for Grid-related information. The key goal of Ovid is to support the seamless navigation of users in the Grid information space. Key aspects of Ovid are: (i) A set of navigational primitives, which are designed to cope with problems such as network disorientation and information overloading; (ii) A small set of Ovid views, which present the enduser with high-level, visual abstractions of Grid information; these abstractions correspond to simple models that capture essential aspects of a Grid infrastructure. (iii) Support for embedding and implementing hyperlinks that connect related entities represented within different information views; (iv) A plug-in mechanism, which enables the seamless integration with Ovid of third-party software that retrieves and displays data from various Grid information sources, and (v) a modular software design, which allows the easy integration of different visualization algorithms that support the graphical representation of large amounts of Grid-related information in the context of Ovid's views.