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, USC/ISI, Summary of NSF Workshop
S. Jha, University College of bond, Application perspective
D. De Roure, University of Southampton, Provenance
I. Foster, ANL & Univ. of Chicago, Lessons from current
Science Grids
John Ibbotson, IBM Hursley, Web service and business
workflow
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