The goal of Kepler CORE is to improve and upgrade" the popular Kepler scientific workflow system from a research prototype to a Comprehensive, Open, Reliable, and Extensible scientific workflow infrastructure. Unlike other scientific workflow systems, Kepler is not driven or owned by one group or institution, but grew out of grass roots community efforts across different NSF (and to a lesser extent DOE) sponsored projects, spread across many sites and institutions, leveraging a pre existing powerful modeling system (Ptolemy II from UC Berkeley). The grass roots nature has led to a very diverse Kepler community: current application areas include biodiversity and ecoinformatics, bioinformatics (e.g. ChIP chip and phylogenetic analysis workflows), cheminformatics, geoinformatics, real time terrestrial and ocean observatory workflows, data management support for large scale simulations (e.g. particle physics), and others, e.g., digital library and archival applications.
As a step towards communitybased sustainability and to continue broad adoption, Kepler CORE will reengineer and enhance the current Kepler system, with the primary goal of independent extensibility, i.e., by groups which are not directly collaborating with the team that develops the refactored Kepler software core. Kepler CORE will gather requirements from stakeholders (groups interested in supporting Kepler) in order to identify and prioritize the reengineering and development activities. A primary goal of the revised architecture are interfaces, components, and packaging mechanisms for Kepler that will make adoption and extension of the system in existing or new areas easier, while further improving the modularity and functionality of the current system.
