Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER
8
Network Analysis and
Reuse of Scientific
Workflows
I
n Chapter 7, we have discussed how Web services and scientific
workflows can integrate heterogeneous resources, streamline data
processing, and eventually foster the Web-scale collaboration. Given
the software tools (caGrid Workflow Toolkit, for example) facilitating
services access and workflow composition, however, scientists still
hesitate to exploit the existing services/workflows. One major reason is
that usually they are unaware of the existence of them, not to mention
how to reuse the best practices [187]. As a consequence, scientists are
not able to effectively incorporate the best practices and tailor them
when they need to build a workflow for their own experiments.
One solution to this challenge is to introduce the social network
(SN) concept into scientific workflows. This chapter addresses the issue
of network analysis and reuse of scientific workflows in a why-what-
how approach.
Why
. First, we review the advances in the social network techno-
logy and its impact on science. Through a survey on social network
services (SNSs) for scientists, we find that social networks not only
