The Grid approach allows collaborative pooling of distributed resources across multiple domains. However, the bene.ts of the Grid are limited to those offered by the commodity application development framework used. Several elegant and .exible application development frameworks support only speci.c Grid architectures, thereby not allowing the applications to exploit the full potential of the Grid. In order to initiate community interest to standardize a high-level abstraction layer for different Grid architectures, this paper introduces a collection of abstractions and data structures that collectively build a basis for an Open Grid Computing Environment.