In a grid, data is stored in geographically-dispersed virtual organizations with varying administrative policies and structures. Current grid middleware provide basic data-management services including data access, transfer and simple replica management. Grid applications often require much more sophisticated and flexible mechanisms for manipulating data than these, including logical hierarchical namespace, automatic replica management and automatic latency management. We propose a view-oriented framework that builds on top of existing middleware and provides global and application-specific logical hierarchical views. Specifically, we developed mechanisms to create, maintain, and update these views. The views are synchronized using an efficient group communication protocol. Gvu (pronounced G-view) is built as a distributed set of synchronized servers and scales much better than the existing grid services. We conducted experiments to measure various aspects of Gvu and report on the results, showing Gvu to outperform existing grid services, thanks to its distributed nature.