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

[Yogesh Simmhan]

Hi Paolo,

| 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
|
I added in a later mail responding to Luc that:

...all our activities are either SQL queries and updates, or file system operations. While our current executables are for MSSQL/C#, the SQL activities are simple enough to port to any relational DBMS (MySQL, Apache Derby, ...) and programming language. The main workflows operate on 3 relational tables with about 50 columns.

If selected, we can provide Java source code using Derby, in addition to the C# version using MSSQL. We'll also provide textual descriptions of the activities to enable them to be ported to other DB/languages...

Hope this helps. Let me know if you have other concerns and I can help you with getting the PS workflows ported to Taverna. In the extreme case, we can always host web services that wrap .NET classes but that may not allow the kind of flexibility teams need with instrumenting the code/DB queries.

Best,
--Yogesh

| 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
|
|