Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER
7
Scientific Workflows
Enabling Web-Scale
Collaboration
S
ervice-oriented architecture (SOA) promises to evolve the Web
from an information hub to a machine-to-machine collaboration plat-
form. In science, where rapid and accurate communication is often vital
to progress, adopting SOA approaches can bring about “service-
oriented science.” Biomedical research is one field that benefits from
Web-scale collaboration using SOA. The effort to virtualize resources
as services in service-oriented science can foster an ecosystem that
facilitates scientific investigation in a Web-scale manner. However, a
healthy service ecosystem requires more than interoperability: it needs
users willing to both use existing services and develop and publish a
steady stream of new ones. Thus, we require tools that facilitate service
development, publication, discovery, and composition.
Scientific workflow tools that can compose and orchestrate services
are an approach for meeting these two requirements and thus sustain the
service ecosystem. First, scientists usually achieve scientific explora-
tions using complex and distributed procedures. If scientific workflow
tools help them discover services that meet their needs and compose
those services in a desired sequence with a lighter programming burden,
they will be more willing to use this ecosystem. Second, user-created
