IEEE eScience: WOOL: A Workflow Programming Language Speaker Geoff Hulette
workflows
(oh thank goodness, some definitions!)

scientists want to focus on domain problems but use computer models so must deal with programming
workflows
- separation of coordination from computation
- data flow naturally expresses parallelism

activities- primitive computations
- any number of inputs and outputs
- connections connect activity inputs and outputs

workflow is a collection of activities and connections

science – triana, vaverna, vistrails, kepler
business – bpel4ws, wsfl
mac – quartz composer
abstract – agwl

another language –
- simple workflow for neuroinformatics and image processing
- other systems don’t scale down easily wrt complexity

abstract – what not how
- runtime neutral
- same workflow representation ona laptop, cluster, or cloud
- text based with a simple syntax ( to use text tools like subversion)
- rich type system
- hierarchical and composable workflows

Labels: IEEEeScience08

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