Support for Cooperative Experiments in e-Science: From Scientific Work flows to Knowledge Sharing - Identification of Ligand Binding Site and Protein-Protein Interaction Area - page 139

verification and reuse. In order to shift focus from secondary sources (i.e. publications)
to the actual data, algorithms, and workflows used in scientific research, a unified
collaborative framework has to be developed, which will enable users of various
HPC infrastructures, data repositories and virtual laboratories to publish and directly
reference their data, and workflows. Science had always a social aspect, as far as
collaboration among scientists is considered e.g. peer-review and scholarly com-
munication. This aspect of science has led to quick adoption of new social tools
which facilitate and accelerate the communication aspects across the scientific
community. Research expertise can be propagated to others and reinvention avoided,
and community curation of data and methods is becoming a powerful and acceptable
way of validation within the scientific community.
The outcome of scientific experiments as well as the methodology, lessons, and
tools obtained can be considered as societal contributions. The publication of the
results necessarily includes provenance data which describes experiment steps,
execution conditions, input data, interactions, activities performed to control the
execution, and the analysis of results (Miles et al. 2007a ) . An environment which
allows scientists to jointly annotate data, and compose documents is therefore
necessary in experiments involving scientists located at various institutions
worldwide.
Mapping three of the four phases of the lifecycle, as described in this section, to
the MACS lab experiment introduced in Sect. 7.2 is straightforward. The prepro-
cessing, experimentation and analysis steps can be respectively mapped to Design ,
Execution , and Analysis phases. The Dissemination phase in the traditional scientific
approach is done mainly through publications in journals and participation in inter-
national conferences. With the emergence of the Web 2.0 approach, often known
as “social web”, new ways of dissemination become possible which go beyond
traditional publications. Published results can be more easily reproduced; tools and
workflow can be shared among scientists worldwide etc. A good example of such
scientific dissemination is the myExperiment site ( http://myexperiment.org ) which
makes it easy to find, use and share scientific workflows, and to build communities.
This sharing model is flexible enough to support various aspects of the lifecycle
management of scientific workflows (De Roure et al. 2009 ; De Roure and Goble
2009 ) .

7.4 Related Work on e-Science Frameworks

In the last decade the field of scientific workflow management systems and virtual
laboratories has attracted interest of the scientific community. A large number of
research projects worldwide focus on the development of workflow frameworks
which can improve the lifecycle of scientific experiments. To gain insight on how
work fl ow support is provided in popular SWMS, we present in this section a review
of the state of art in the field of scientific workflow management systems. This study