School of Computer Science,
Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK
Email: Ian.J.Taylor@cs.cardiff.ac.uk
25th May 2007
This GridNet2 report provides an overview of my activities in research and working groups at the Open Grid Forum (OGF) 20 meeting in Manchester, May 7 - 11, 2007. I participated in the following:
• Co-organizer and Speaker of the “Sharing Workflows” - Workflow Management Research Group (WFMRG) session
• Participant: OGSA Workflow
• Participant: eArts and eHumanities - eScience technologies and methodologies in Arts and Humanities research, session 1 and 2
• Participant: SOKU Workshop
I chaired and co-organised the Sharing Workflows session with the group’s co-chair, Ewa
Deelman. The session focused on the need for sharing workflows for scientific applications rather than focusing on standardisation of workflow representations (as other groups are i.e. OGSA Workflow). The session had a number of speakers with a range of topics within the workflow-sharing paradigm. The agenda was:
• 10:30 “Introduction and Motivation”, Ian Taylor
• 10:35 Levels of the Grid Workflow Interoperability - Adrian Toth, University of
Miskolc.
• 10:45 ”Workflow Optimization and Sharing Using Performance Information” - Omer
Rana, Cardiff University
• 10:55 ”Scheduling Data Intensive Workflows Onto Storage-Constrained Distributed
Resources” - Rizos Sakellariou, University of Manchester
• 11:05 ”myExperiment - social software for workflow sharing” - David De Roure, University of Southampton and OMII-UK
• 11:15 ”The WHIP Plugin for Workflow and Artefact Sharing” - Andrew Harrison,
Cardiff University
• 11:25 ”Shibboleth Protection and Management of Workflows” - Richard Sinnott, National e-Science Centre, University of Glasgow
• 11:35 ”A Workflow Mapping Mechanism for establishing Quality of Service Guarantees”, Dimosthenis Kyriazis, Telecommunications Laboratory, National Technical
University of Athens
1

• 11:35 Discussion on Document Focus Research document on application scenarios for
OGF-21
The session was a success with a number of discussions evolving from the various presentations. The speakers and participants were enthusiastic about being involved in the creation of a OGF research document on the subject of gathering use cases for sharing workflows. This will be initiated with progress made in time for OGF 21, where we will discuss the use cases and take the subject further.
Being co-chair of the WFM-RG, I attended this session to observe current work in the workflow arena for OGSA. The general theme of the group was to gather current use cases and discuss possible standardisation of workflow for OGSA. There were a number of discussions about BPEL4WS and its suitability for OGSA. There were also discussions about the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC), a global organization of adopters, developers, consultants, analysts, as well as university and research groups engaged in workflow and Business Process Management Software. The discussions ended up in favour of BPEL to some extent, but really both the discussions and use case gathering are at a very early stage. I will be monitoring this group over the coming OGFs. Personally, it will be interesting to see where they go with this and whether there will be adoption of a specific workflow language for Grid computing. Most current workflow systems have not adopted such an approach so it will be interesting to see how the field evolves over the coming years.
This workshop was a BOF split into two sessions with presentations from the work of
TextGrid in Germany, the Arts and Humanities e-Science Initiative in the UK (David De
Roure) and presentations from related projects in the US (Steve Beck was amongst the speakers). The second session involved more discussions about possible routes to standardisation in the eArts and eHumanities. One of the presentations (Steve Becks) included some slides on the work we are doing in Cardiff in this area on the DART mini-PIPSS
PPARC project, which is looking at using P2P and workflow technologies for distributed music information retrieval.
An underlying theme in a number of OGF sessions was the increasing focus on Web 2.0
and social network-based technologies to support collaboration between application users.
Web 2.0 technologies (such as the AJAX, JSON, etc) and mash ups were a hot topic in the
SOKU session also. The session included presentations from a number of speakers including
David De Roure and Pinar Alper from the UK. I attended the session out of interest and to understand the different perspectives on SOKU. It was interesting to see the vision from the different speakers.