svn commit: r1655941 - /incubator/taverna/site/trunk/content/introduction/what-is-a-workflow-management-system.md

[br...@apache.org]

Author: brenninc
Date: Fri Jan 30 06:29:34 2015
New Revision: 1655941

URL: http://svn.apache.org/r1655941
Log:
Added What is a Workflow Management System?

Added:
    incubator/taverna/site/trunk/content/introduction/what-is-a-workflow-management-system.md

Added: incubator/taverna/site/trunk/content/introduction/what-is-a-workflow-management-system.md
URL: http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/incubator/taverna/site/trunk/content/introduction/what-is-a-workflow-management-system.md?rev=1655941&view=auto
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+Title:     What is a Workflow Management System?
+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.
+
+
+
+Workflow Management System (WMS) is a piece of software that provides an infrastructure to setup, execute, and monitor [scientific workflows][1]. 
+In other words, the WMS provide an environment where in silico experiments[link text][2] can be defined and executed.
+
+An important function of an WMS during the workflow execution, or enactment, is the coordination of operation of individual components that constitute the workflow – the process also often referred to as orchestration.
+
+As research becomes more data-intensive and more reliant on the use of computers, larger volumes of experimentation data are recorded quicker and with greater precision. This trend has spurred significant increase in complexity of scientific simulation software. Many tools only perform a small well-defined task, thus necessitating that several of them are joined in a pipeline to model a useful experiment.
+
+Additional difficulties arise from the need to deal with the 
incompatible data formats that various services produce or consume. 
It is evident that considerable amount of computer science knowledge is required to overcome the 
outlined problems; however, domain scientists across disciplines do not have sufficient relevant 
expertise.
+
+Scientific workflows and WMSs have emerged to solve this problem and provide an easy-to-use 
way of specifying the tasks that have to be performed during a specific in silico experiment. The 
need to combine several tools into a single research analysis still holds, but technical details of 
workflow execution are now delegated to Workflow Management Systems.
+
+
+  [1]: /introduction/why-use-workflows.html
+  [2]: /introduction/what-is-in-silico-experimentation.html
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