Model-as-you-go: An Approach for an Advanced Infrastructure for Scientific Workflows

Most of the existing scientific workflow systems rely on proprietary concepts and workflow languages. We are convinced that the conventional workflow technology that is established in business scenarios for years is also beneficial for scientists and scientific applications. We are therefore working on a scientific workflow system based on business workflow concepts and technologies. The system offers advanced flexibility features to scientists in order to support them in creating workflows in an explorative manner and to increase robustness of scientific applications. We named the approach Model-as-you-go because it enables users to model and execute workflows in an iterative process that eventually results in a complete scientific workflow. In this paper, we present main ingredients of Model-as-you-go, show how existing workflow concepts have to be extended in order to cover the requirements of scientists, discuss the application of the concepts to BPEL, and introduce the current prototype of the system.     

Combining horizontal and vertical composition of services

Service composition is a well-established field of research in the service community. Services are commonly regarded as black boxes with well-defined interfaces that can be recursively aggregated into new services. The black-box nature of services does not only include the service implementation but also implies the use of middleware and hardware to run the services. Thus, service composition techniques are typically limited to choosing between a set of available services. In this paper, we keep the black-box nature and the principle of information hiding of services, but in addition we break up services vertically. By introducing vertical service composition, we allow services to be provisioned on demand using the middleware and runtime environment that specifically meets user-required quality of services. Therefore, a service is setup individually for services requestors instead of providing them with a pre-determined list of available services to choose from. We introduce the concept of vertical service composition and present an extension to an enterprise service bus that implements the concept of vertical service composition by combining concepts from provisioning with those of (dynamic) service binding.