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Posted to commits@taverna.apache.org by br...@apache.org on 2015/01/29 16:02:11 UTC
svn commit: r1655695 -
/incubator/taverna/site/trunk/content/introduction/why-use-workflows.md
Author: brenninc
Date: Thu Jan 29 15:02:11 2015
New Revision: 1655695
URL: http://svn.apache.org/r1655695
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Added why use workflows
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incubator/taverna/site/trunk/content/introduction/why-use-workflows.md
Added: incubator/taverna/site/trunk/content/introduction/why-use-workflows.md
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+Title: Why use workflows?
+Notice: Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one
+ or more contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file
+ distributed with this work for additional information
+ regarding copyright ownership. The ASF licenses this file
+ to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the
+ "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance
+ with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
+ .
+ http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
+ .
+ Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing,
+ software distributed under the License is distributed on an
+ "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY
+ KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the
+ specific language governing permissions and limitations
+ under the License.
+
+##History##
+
+Workflow, as a concept, was defined in the business domain in 1996 by the Workflow Management Coalition as:
+
+> âThe automation of a business process, in whole or part, during which documents,
+ information or tasks are passed from one participant to another for action,
+ according to a set of procedural rules.â
+
+##Scientific workflows##
+
+Scientific workflows are widely recognised as a âuseful paradigm to describe, manage,
+ and share complex scientific analysesâ. They are the method often used by the [in silico experimentation][1].
+
+Scientific workflows have emerged to tackle the problem of excessive complexity in scientific experiments and
+ applications.
+They provide a high-level declarative way of specifying what a particular in silico experiment modelled
+by a workflow is set to achieve, not how it will be executed.
+
+Various types of tasks that can be performed within a workflow can be implemented by local services,
+ remote Web services, scripts, and sub-workflows (complete workflows used as subroutines in larger ones).
+Each component is only responsible for a small fragment of functionality,
+ therefore many components need to be chained in a pipeline in order to obtain a workflow that can perform
+ a useful task.
+
+The process of linking components is known as workflow composition,
+ a result of which a conceptual model of the described scientific analysis is produced.
+This model is often represented as a graph-like structure (example can be seen in Figure 1 below)
+ that defines the flow of data within the workflow â and thus its semantic meaning.
+Representations of all required heterogeneous resources are integrated into this single workflow,
+ thus abstracting superfluous detail and concentrating on the real goal of the experiment.
+
+An example of simple workflow that retrieves a weather forecast for the specified city
+
+<img class="img-center" title="Get weather forecast for a city workflow" src="/img/get_weather_workflow.png"
+ alt="An example of simple workflow that retrieves a weather forecast for the specified city"
+ width="195" height="269" />
+
+<p class="text-center">
+Figure 1. An example of a simple workflow that retrieves a weather forecast for the specified city
+</p>
+
+The use of workflows allows offloading much of the data processing to remote components and
+ makes it feasible to execute even larger and more complex workflows on regular personal computers.
+This is the reason why Web services are normally chosen to perform most of the core computation in workflows,
+ whereas local services and scripts are used to perform data format conversion procedures and
+ other auxiliary tasks.
+
+A further advantage of using workflows is the potential to automate highly repetitive processing stages that
+ research work is known to involve. This, in turn, can stimulate the pace of research and
+ the overall productivity of experimentation through evident savings in time and effort.
+
+To learn more about scientific workflows and their role in data-intensive experiments, have a look at:
+
+ - [âThe impact of workflow tools on data-centric researchâ][2] chapter
+ by Carole Goble and David De Roure of the [âThe Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discoveryâ][3] book.
+ - [âScientific workflowsâ][4] paper by Katy Wolstencroft, Paul Fisher, David De Roure and Carole Goble.
+
+Massive power, minimal complexity
+
+Because services within a workflow do not normally reside on the machine you use to create and run the workflow,
+ your local machine does not have to be a supercomputer.
+By installing and using the Taverna [Workflow Management System[5] you can tap into the resources of
+ a number of institutes, hundreds of analysis applications and literally thousands of CPUs worth of
+ computational power entirely for free, with no installation or support hassle for you.
+
+Of course, if you already have significant resource in house it is a relatively simple matter to
+ integrate these resources in Taverna with those available from other sites.
+
+
+ [1]: /introduction/what-is-in-silico-experimentation.html
+ [2]: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/collaboration/fourthparadigm/4th_paradigm_book_part3_goble_deroure.pdf
+ [3]: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/collaboration/fourthparadigm/
+ [4]: http://cnx.org/content/m32861/latest/content_info
+ [5]: /introduction/what-is-a-workflow-management-system.html
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