Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
specialized build-time and run-time software tools are needed to
create services and execute them. Currently, several toolkits, such
as Globus Toolkit [161] and a package offered by OMII-UK
project [162], are available to address this need.
Discover.
Being aware of services of interest and choosing which
one(s) to use is not a trivial task since SOS exists in a Web-scale
ecosystem in which many organizations provide many services.
Users may not know these services' URLs or functions and
semantics. Because the scientific community is too autonomous
to share a common terminology, without domain knowledge it is
impossible to determine a service's exact semantics using its
syntax. An SOS ecosystem must establish an agreed-on vocabu-
lary and use it to annotate services, such that users can discover
them with less ambiguity. Currently, there exist several seman-
tics-based service annotation and discovery mechanisms, and
most of them rely on W3C's Resource Description Framework
(RDF) [19].
Compose.
Due to the diversified purposes and approaches that
scientists have, fewWeb services alone can fulfill the requirement
of an
in-silico
experiment. Instead, services often need to be
composed and orchestrated in a given sequence, which is called
a scientific workflow. Taylor et al. [72] give a comprehensive
survey of the existing standards and tools for scientific workflows.
Publish.
To foster a service ecosystem, scientists should be not
only users but also contributors to SOS. They can either expose
the resources (data, programs, instruments, computers, etc.) they
own as services, or publish a composite service that invokes
multiple services. A composite service, usually in the form of a
scientific workflow, can represent a novel experimental routine
that is a new intellectual property to SOS. This use-and-publish
paradigm is also changing the way people publish their results.
Currently, a couple of tools including Trident [163] have pro-
vided Microsoft Word plug-ins so that scientists can embed a
workflow in a research paper and rerun them to reproduce the
experimental results.
Community.
By performing tasks such as
creating
,
discovering
,
composing
, and
publishing
, scientists can greatly benefit from
