A context- and role-driven scientific workflow development pattern

Abstract

Scientific workflow execution often demands data-centric and computation-intensive collaboration efforts, which is typically different from the process-centric workflow execution with fixed execution specifications. Scientific workflow execution often challenges the traditional workflow development strategy in dynamic context management and role definition. In view of this observation, application context spectrums are firstly distinguished from different profiles of scientific workflow development. Then, a role enactment strategy is proposed for enabling workflow execution in certain application context. They jointly enhance the validity of a scientific workflow development through clearly articulating the correlation between computational subjects and computational objects engaged in scientific workflow system. Furthermore, a novel context- and role-driven scientific workflow development pattern is proposed for enacting a scientific workflow system on the Grid. Finally, a case study is presented to demonstrate the generic natures of the methods in this paper. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.