|
Overview
The Gardens Point Flow (GPFlow) is an intuitive workflow environment to
support scientists with their research. The workflow wraps legacy tools,
presenting a high level interactive web based frontend to scientists. The
workflow backend is realized by a commercial grade workflow engine
(Biztalk). The workflow model is inspired by spreadsheets and is novel in
its support for an intuitive method of interaction as required by many
scientists e.g. bioinformaticians. The goal of GPFlow is flexibility and
simplicity. Current work involves porting GPFlow to the windows workflow
foundation: http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/building/workflow/default.aspx
A demo version of GPFlow can be found here http://eresearch.fit.qut.edu.au/portal/
We would like to thank Microsoft Research Redmond and the Australian
Research Council for supporting this project.
Research team
Researchers
Associate Professor Paul Roe
Dr Glenn Smith
Dr On Wong
Jiro Sumitomo
Research Students
Scott Mann
Asbjørn Rygg
Papers
Asbjørn Rygg, Scott Mann, Paul Roe, On Wong, "Bio-Workflows with BizTalk:
Using a Commercial Workflow Engine for eScience," e-science, pp. 116-123,
First International Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing
(e-Science'05), 2005.
Abstract: Workflow is an important enabling technology for eScience.
Research into workflow systems for eScience has yielded several specialized
workflow engines. In this paper we investigate the nature of scientific workflow
and describe how an existing business workflow engine, Microsoft’s BizTalk, can
be adapted to support scientific workflow, and some advantages of doing this.
We demonstrate how BizTalk is able to support scientific workflow through the
implementation of two real bioinformatics workflows. These workflows are enacted
through a novel web based interface making them widely accessible.
|
