Dear All, The International Virtual Observatory Alliance is a group of astronomers who are working on shared Grid software for astronomy. I asked them about their work on managing data in a distributed environment and they pointed me at the following document: http://www.ivoa.net/internal/IVOA/IvoaGridAndWebServices/vostore-0.18.pd f. At a quick glance, this seems to describe requirements for one interface to abstract storage provision and another to abstract data distribution (such as grid file systems). I suggest that this is worth a look to see what overlap, if any, exists with the work of the OGSA-D and GFS WGs (and possibly also GSM?). The IVOA are actively working on this, so the document referenced above will be superseded in due course. Best wishes, Dave Berry Research Manager, National e-Science Centre 15 South College St., Edinburgh Tel: +44 131 6514039