[wfm-rg] Panel on Workflow as the Methodology of Science at WORKS06 in Paris June 20th

[Ewa Deelman]

Below is the information about the panel to be conducted during WORKS06
(Workshop on Workflows in Support of Large-Scale Science) in Paris in
conjunction with HPDC.  

 

 

 

Panel on "Workflow as the Methodology of Science"

Tuesday June 20 2006 WORKS Workshop 

HPDC Paris France 12pm - 1.30pm

http://www.isi.edu/works06    

Moderator Geoffrey Fox

 

A recent NSF workshop http://vtcpc.isi.edu/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
proposed that workflow could be viewed as  underlying support for the
scientific methodology emerging in many fields and involving distributed
interdisciplinary data deluged scientific methodology as an end
(instrument, conjecture) to end (publication, archived results) process.
This vision for workflow mixes the coupled execution of related services
characteristic of most scientific workflow with the more asynchronous
longer term processes familiar in some business workflow. Can one
usefully link these different styles of workflow and further enhance
scientific productivity?

One challenge is reproducibility of this full process which is core to
the scientific method and requires rich provenance, interoperable
persistent repositories with linkage of open data and publication as
well as distributed simulations, data analysis and new algorithms. The
distributed reproducible science methodology can be supported by
publishing all steps in a sort of electronic logbook that is the
"script" of the full scientific workflow. It would need to capture the
scientific process (data analysis) as a rich cloud of resources
including emails, presentations, wikis as well as databases, compiler
options, build time/runtime configurations etc. One could need to
separate wheat from chaff in this electronic record (logbook) keeping
only that required to make process reproducible and allowing selective
execution (checking) of components of the log.

Is this a reasonable picture for a future workflow requirement and what
are the new research challenges it engenders?

The presentations at NSF meeting can be found at
http://vtcpc.isi.edu/wiki/index.php/Documents  and give us a starting
point!

 

Contributors:

E. Deelman                 Summary of NSF Workshop

S. Jha                           Application perspective

D. De Roure                Provenance

I. Foster                       Lessons from current Science Grids

TBD                           Web service and business workflow

 

 

 

 

 

Ewa Deelman, PhD
Research Assistant Professor, USC Computer Science Department
Research Team Leader, Center for Grid Technologies
USC Information Sciences Institute
4676 Admiralty Way, suite 1001
Marina Del Rey, CA 90292                                    
(310) 448-8408           http://www.isi.edu/~deelman

 

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