[provenance-challenge] Re: PC3 E-Science meeting details

[Paolo Missier]

Hi all,
> Also, for those of you not at e-Science, we still want your input on 
> the proposed workflows. Please send your comments along, they are much 
> appreciated.
 here are some brief earlier comments that didn't make it to the list:

> Also, could you encode and run Yogesh's workflow (or part of it) into 
> Taverna?
This will involve quite a bit of implementation effort on our side for 
Taverna workflows. It can be done, but most of it will be bespoke code 
that we'll have to write, and the workflow will look "simply" like an 
orchestration of beanshell scripts.

Yogesh wrote on the wiki:
> A XOML representation of the Pan-STARRS workflows will be provided 
> along with .NET libraries for the activities in the workflow. This 
> will allow the workflows to be run using Windows .NET Workflow Runtime 
> (Windows XP/Vista/Server 200X). 
but I guess this will only be useful to validate our own implementation? 
It wouldn't help us with provenance

Regarding our own submission:
> The workflows you published are also interesting, but could you 
> clarify (maybe on the mailing list)
> how much they are Taverna specific or not.
they are not Taverna-specific in that all services used in the workflow 
are either public Web services, or scripts (beanshell) that can be 
executed by any beanshell interpreter (so there is no need to write any 
new code for these).
As we discussed in an older exchange, however, it clearly does rely upon 
external services, as is the case for most real-life scientific 
workflows -- but we see this as an advantage, as one won't need to 
develop specific adapters to interface with proprietary SW as may be the 
case with other examples -- only "WS" clients, which are probably 
available on the WS support sites, anyway.

Best, -Paolo