This collection of articles on 'Work?ows for e-Science' is very timely and - portant. Increasingly, to attack the next generation of scienti?c problems, multidisciplinary and distributed teams of scientists need to collaborate to make progress on these new 'Grand Challenges'. Scientists now need to access and exploit computational resources and databases that are geographically distributed through theuseof high speed networks. 'Virtual Organizations' or 'VOs' must be established that span multiple administrative domains and/or institutions and which can provide appropriate authentication and author- ation services and access controls to collaborating members. Some of these VOsmayonlyhavea?eetingexistencebutthelifetimeofothersmayrun into many years. The Grid community is attempting to develop both sta- ards and middleware to enable both scientists and industry to build such VOs routinely and robustly. This, of course, has been the goal of research in distributed computing for many years; but now these technologies come with a new twist service orie- ation. By specifying resources in terms of a service description, rather than allowing direct access to the resources, the IT industry believes that such an approach results in the construction of more robust distributed systems. The industry has therefore united around web services as the standard technology toimplementsuchserviceorientedarchitecturesandtoensureinteroperability between di?erent vendor systems.
Scientific Workflow has seen massive growth in recent years as science becomes increasingly reliant on the analysis of massive data sets and the use of distributed resources. The workflow programming paradigm is seen as a means of managing the complexity in defining the analysis, executing the necessary computations on distributed resources, collecting information about the analysis results, and providing means to record and reproduce the scientific analysis.
Workflows for e-Science presents an overview of the current state of the art in the field. It brings together research from many leading computer scientists in the workflow area and provides real world examples from domain scientists actively involved in e-Science. The computer science topics addressed in the book provide a broad overview of active research focusing on the areas of workflow representations and process models, component and service-based workflows, standardization efforts, workflow frameworks and tools, and problem solving environments and portals.
The topics covered represent a broad range of scientific workflow and will be of interest to a wide range of computer science researchers, domain scientists interested in applying workflow technologies in their work, and engineers wanting to develop workflow systems and tools. As such Workflows for e-Science is an invaluable resource for potential or existing users of workflow technologies and a benchmark for developers and researchers.
