The need to organize and publish metadata about European research results in the field of natural disasters has been met with
the help of two innovative technologies: the Open Grid Service Architecture (OGSA) and the Resource Description Framework
(RDF). OGSA provides a common platform for sharing distributed metadata securely. RDF facilitates the creation and exchange
of metadata. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a Grid-based digital library for natural-disaster
research metadata. We describe the EU-MEDIN RDF schema that we propose to standardize the description of natural-disaster
resources, and the gDisDL Grid service-based architecture for storing and querying of RDF metadata in a secure and distributed
manner. Finally, we describe a prototype implementation of gDisDL using the Jena RDF Library by HP and the Globus 3 toolkit.
Work supported in part by the European Commission under the EU-MEDIN project (grant agreement no. EVG1-CT-60003).