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processing track [171]. Workflows have been extended to automate
business processes both inside and across enterprises, and have found
growing attention in the grid community, showing the power of parallel
computation, scientific investigation, and job flowmanagement [72,73].
This topic specifically focuses on the domain of biological science
where Web-based services have provided scientists with the access to
various data and computation resources, whereas, in general, scientific
workflows can contain other types of tasks such as invocations to local
and remote applications.
Today, the number of available Web services has grown signifi-
cantly. BioCatalogue [172], a curated catalogue of life science Web
services, has collected more than 1400 services from over 100 provid-
ers, and a 2006 paper [173] reported 3000 publicly available services in
molecular biology. With the help of workflow technologies, scientists
can build a model of their data pipelines integrating distributed data and
analytic resources, automate these data pipelines that were previously
Figure 7.3
Scientific workflow in biological and biomedical sciences.
