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The Semantic Grid takes the standards of the Semantic Web usch as RDF and OWL and combines them with the technology of Grid Computing, sometimes called the Computational Grid. There is a strong association between Grid Computing and SOA architecture.

One of the best descriptions from the article Semantic Grid is Laying the Foundations for the Semantic Grid (PDF ):

Information relating to the resources, applications and the user’s wishes are key to the transparent and effective exploitation of the federated resources within Computational Grids. These federated data, computational or software resources are owned by real organisations and made available as services to different computational communities or virtual organisations spanning multiple administrative boundaries. Higher-level services use the information relating to the resources’ capability and the mechanisms for service fulfilment to automatically discover interoperable services and select the most appropriate service for the user with minimal human intervention.

The key ideas are interoperable semantic services shared among computational communities, such as research labs and academic institutions. Generally, the tasks are scientific number crunching or other specificalized subjects but not necessarily so. The technology could lend itself to a shared community of knowledge for non-scientific subjects as well.