The goal of this research aims to produce a general-purpose but domain-customizable collaborative scientific workflow tool for accelerating scientific discovery, particularly facilitating large-scale and cross-disciplinary research projects that are collaborative in nature and require intensive user interaction from multiple distributed domain scientists. As a natural extension to the existing single user-oriented scientific workflow management tools by providing direct system support for scientific collaboration, this project seeks to pave a way toward a next-generation tool supporting scientific collaboration over the Internet. The expected tool can be easily expanded to support data-centric collaborative information management in any intelligence community.
To achieve this broader impact, this research seeks to establish a set of foundational models and techniques supporting collaborative scientific workflow composition and management; and based on them, construct an Internet-based collaborative scientific workflow tool framed with an open-source initiative. The initial focus of the Early Concept Grants Exploratory Research (EAGER) project is on rapidly creating a prototype tool as a proof of concept, equipped with basic dataflow-oriented scientific workflow models and collaboration patterns integrated in an agile service-oriented architecture. To avoid reinventing the wheel, the efforts will be concentrated on transforming and extending Taverna, a known open-source scientific workflow management tool, into a collaborative version. Evaluations and validations will be conducted through partnerships with multiple collaborative scientific communities.
For further information, see the project website at www.CollaborativeScientificWorkflows.org/
