Scientific Workflow: The Analytic Web

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Analytic Web

SciWalker

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Static Analysis of Concurrent Systems

Process Programming and Workflow

Scientific Workflow: The Analytic Web

The Internet has changed forever the way in which science will be done. Worldwide scientific collaborations, such as Globus, and specific projects, such as GriPhyN, are beginning to use internet access to create opportunities for scientists to make data available to worldwide communities, thereby enabling expedited collaborations among geographically distributed researchers. While this creates opportunities through the broader availability of more comprehensive scientific analyses, it also creates risks arising from uncertainty about the way in which internet-accessed data were produced and the appropriate ways in which they can be used. Scientific workflow is the application of workflow technology to scientific endeavours, and is becoming recognized as a valuable approach for assisting scientists in accessing and analyzing data.

Our approach builds upon the hypothesis that complex scientific analyses are in fact intricate processes whose important subtleties should be captured with the help of process definition capabilities. While at some high, abstract level scientific processes might be modeled as simple graphs, which may be visually appealing, we believe that such simplistic models omit important process details. Our hypothesis is that process definition formalism should be used to define scientific processes thereby enabling the use of tools to analyze, verify, and execute them.

An analytic web is a collection of related graph structures that taken together provide precise definitions of scientific processes used to process raw and derived datasets. The graph structures are:

• A dataflow graph description of a scientific process,
• A data derivation graph that provides a precise description of how a dataset was derived, and
• A process definition graph that supports a more complex, detailed description of a process when needed.

SciWalker is a toolset that supports the creation, execution, and validation of scientific processes represented as an analytic web.

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