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OTM Confederated International Conferences "On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems"

OTM 2008: On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: OTM 2008 pp 374–391Cite as

Towards a Calculus for Collection-Oriented Scientific Workflows with Side Effects

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 5331))

Abstract

In this paper we propose a calculus that can be used to describe the semantics of collection-oriented scientific workflow systems such as the Taverna workbench. Typically such systems focus on the specification and execution of workflows with a relatively simple control flow and a more complex data flow that involves large nested collections of data. An essential operation in such workflows is the instantiation of a certain nested workflow for each element of a collection. We argue that if such workflows call external services, their semantics must be described not only in terms of input-output behavior but also take side effects into account. Based on this assumption a trace semantics is defined that corresponds to the observational equivalence of two workflow specifications. We show that under such a semantics a relatively small calculus with a structural semantics can be defined and used to describe such workflows. This is demonstrated by giving a translation of Taverna workflows in terms of this calculus.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Antwerp, Belgium

    Jan Hidders

  2. University of Warsaw, Poland

    Jacek Sroka

Authors
  1. Jan Hidders
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  2. Jacek Sroka
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. STARLab, Bldg G/10, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Pleinlaan 2, 1050, Brussels, Belgium

    Robert Meersman

  2. School of Computer Science and Information Technology, Bld 10.10, RMIT University, 376-392 Swanston Street, VIC 3001, Melbourne, Australia

    Zahir Tari

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© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Hidders, J., Sroka, J. (2008). Towards a Calculus for Collection-Oriented Scientific Workflows with Side Effects. In: Meersman, R., Tari, Z. (eds) On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: OTM 2008. OTM 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5331. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-88871-0_25

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-88871-0_25

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-88870-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-88871-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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