I. INTRODUCTION
Traditional information retrieval has long been dominated by a location-centric organization of application objects (e.g. files in directories or messages in folders) and a navigational metaphor that requires users to specify a path to access desired objects.
An alternative paradigm growing increasingly common is the use of grid-based information retrieval to assist the user in finding objects associatively by their properties.
Grid-based information retrieval is a new initiative to bring together information retrieval techniques with grid technologies. Grid technologies will offer new techniques and powerful information retrieval systems, whilst information retrieval will offer the grid new ways of handling and discovering information.