The Second IEEE International Workshop on Scientific Workflows (SWF’08)

Hawaii, USA, July 8, 2008

in conjunction with IEEE International Conference on Services Computing

Call for Papers

Description

Today, many scientific discoveries are achieved through complex and distributed scientific computations that are represented and structured as scientific workflows. User friendly scientific workflow systems are increasingly being developed to enable e-scientists to integrate, structure, and orchestrate various local or remote data and service resources to perform various in silico experiments to produce interesting scientific discovery. The critical role of scientific workflows in cyberinfrastructure bas been recognized by a recent NSF workshop on the challenges of scientific workflows in May 2006, which concluded that “workflows should become first-class entities in cyberinfrastructure architecture. For domain scientists, they are important because workflows document and manage the increasingly complex processes involved in exploration and discovery through computations. For computer scientists, workflows provide a formal and declarative representation of complex distributed computations that must be managed efficiently through their lifecycle from assembly, to execution, to sharing.”

Although existing workflow systems are able to support complex computations and data repositories in a distributed environment, they do not meet the newly emerging requirements from scientists to handle streaming data, accommodate interactive steering, support event-driven analysis, and enable collaborative scientific research involving many scientists across disciplines and geographically distributed over the world. The scientific domain introduces tremendous new requirements and challenges of which traditional workflow systems fall short. For example, in the scientific domain, instead of executing a pre-designed workflow, a scientist prefers to design a workflow on the fly and then run it. Based on the results, the scientist might modify the workflow a bit, select another dataset, change some input parameters, and then rerun the modified workflow. Such an exploratory procedure is usually not available for business workflows. Moreover, although logs are used in business workflows to keep track of execution history, such information is not sufficient in the scientific domain, where the management of provenance metadata including workflow definitions, evolution, and execution is essential for the support of scientific discovery reproducibility, result interpretation, and problem diagnosis. To meet these new requirements, new workflow architectures, models, languages, theories, and techniques need to be investigated, leading to the recent emergence of the new field of “scientific workflows”.

Authors are invited to submit regular papers (8 pages), short papers (4 pages), and demo papers (2 pages) that show original unpublished research results in all areas of scientific workflows. Topics of interest are listed below; however, submissions on all aspects of scientific workflows are welcome. For demo papers, at least one author is expected to present a demo in the workshop during the demo session, special arrangement will be made to meet the need of the authors.

List of topics

· Service-oriented scientific workflows and workflow-based Web services

· Security of Web services and scientific workflows

· Data integration and service integration in scientific workflows

· Application service management in scientific workflows

· Data service management in scientific workflows

· Scientific workflow architectures, models, and languages

· Grid workflow management

· Scientific workflow mapping, optimization, and scheduling

· Scientific workflow modeling, verification, and validation

· Scientific workflow provenance management

· Workflow and provenance mining and analysis

· Scalability, reliability, extensibility, agility, and interoperability

· Scientific workflow real-life applications

Important dates

· Regular paper (8 pages) March 2, submission due.

· Short papers (4 pages) and demo papers (2 pages), March 15, submission due.

· April 2, 2008, decision notification.

· April 15, 2008, camera-ready version due.

Paper submissions

See instructions provided by the ICWS/SCC conference for all workshops. At least one author should register for the workshop for the accepted paper (regular, poster, or demo) to appear in the final proceedings of the workshop.

Workshop chairs

· Shiyong Lu, Wayne State University, Email: shiyong@wayne.edu

· Calton Pu, Georgia Tech

Publication chair

· Yong Zhao, Microsoft Corporation, Email: yozha@microsoft.com

Publicity chair

· Artem Chebotko, Wayne State University, Email: artem@wayne.edu

Program committee

· Ilkay Altintas, San Diego Supercomputer Center, U.S.A.

· Roger Barga, Microsoft Research, U.S.A.

· Adam Barker, University of Edinburgh, U.K.

· Shawn Bowers, UC Davis Genome Center, U.S.A.

· Hasan Davulcu, Arizona State University, U.S.A.

· Ewa Deelman, USC Information Sciences Institute, U.S.A.

· Farshad Fotouhi, Wayne State University, U.S.A.

· Geoffrey Fox, Indiana University, U.S.A.

· Juliana Freire, University of Utah, U.S.A.

· Dennis Gannon, Indiana University, U.S.A.

· Carole Goble, University of Manchester, U.K.

· Xiaolin Li, Oklahoma State University, U.S.A.

· Yogesh Simmhan, Microsoft Corporation, U.S.A.

· Munindar Singh, North Carolina State University, U.S.A.

· Ian Taylor, Cardiff University, U.K.

· Liqiang Wang, University of Wyoming, U.S.A.

· Ping Yang, Binghamton University, U.S.A.

· Yong Zhao, Microsoft Corporation, U.S.A.

· Zhiming Zhao, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Previous SWF workshops

· First IEEE International Workshop on Scientific Workflows (SWF07)