CROWN, short for China Research and Development environment Over Wide-area Network, is a grid testbed to facilitate scientific activities in different disciplines.

　　 As we planned, the whole CROWN platform comprises 3 parts. Firstly, many resources (including computers, clusters and some storage devices) should be connected via a nation-wide network infrastructure) to build up the CROWN architecture. Secondly, series of gird middleware and auxiliary tools should be provided to meet the common requirements of different scientific activities in all kinds of areas. This will greatly simplify the development and management of Grid applications with various functions. Finally, a number of typical applications should be put in use over the architecture and middleware to demonstrate the feasibility and robustness of CROWN. What’s more, we hope we can make contribution to GGF in the field of specifications of Grid Applications development and management.

　　CROWN is established on the basis of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) on the conception of wrapping all resources as web services and organizing them by physical topology, therefore, it creates a controllable and manageable resource overlay based on the existing TCP/IP network. In such an overlay, we will develop the service management capabilities such as resource describing and publishing, automatic service discovering and interoperating.

　　As the leading Grid project in China, CROWN should be a a platform supporting research and activities in various academic areas via providing a uniform access portal accessed by all kinds of scientific facilities and resources. Besides, as the key project sponsored by NSFC, CROWN should also act as a testbed to validate and benchmark the concerning theories and techniques in emerging Grid technology. Therefore, while designing CROWN, we regard the performance and efficiency as both vital targets. First, CROWN should be feasible and easy to use, then it should also be scalable and easy to upgrade, as a result, we can carry out more R&D work and put more features into CROWN as time goes by.

　　Applications over CROWN: UDM(University Digital Museum)

　　UDM is a project supported by the Ministry of Education, P.R.China. It is one of the key projects launched by Education developing programs for the 21 century to facilitate the remote education over internet. The main target of UDM is building a digital museum to integrate the existing resources in 18 university museums specialized in geography, archaeology, human culture history, aviation and so on. The UDM is helpful in items collection, exchange, study, storage, protection, and exhibition.

　　As we can see, there are many shortcomings of such old-fashioned distributed university digital museums in different servers: the different digital museums can only communicate with each other by the hyperlinks and result in the disadvantages of information redundancy, storage resource wasted and “information silos”, so university digital museums (even the different digital museums with the same subject) can not implement the effective resource communication, information integration and share. Besides those mentioned above, because the classifying and filtering of specimen information is not available, it can only offer the visitors with different academic background the single information channel and service.

　　To solve such problems, information grid technology offers many effective methods to implement the resource sharing, information management and information service. In other words, the information grid generates information resources through classifying, organizing and processing the original data supplied by different resources. Meanwhile, it discovers the internal relations of the information resources and offer users with the unified and transparent information service.

    The UDM grid aims at integrating the resource of the 18 university digital museum to render more advanced information service based on the available resources, for instance, advanced information indexing.