Scientific Workflow Management -- For Whom?

Workflow management has been widely adopted by scientific communities as a valuable tool to carry out complex experiments. It allows for the possibility to perform computations for data analysis and simulations, whereas hiding details of the complex infrastructures underneath. There are many workflow management systems that offer a large variety of generic services to coordinate the execution of workflows. Nowadays, there is a trend to extend the functionality of workflow management systems to cover all possible requirements that may arise from a user community. However, there are multiple scenarios for usage of workflow systems, involving various actors that require different services to be supported by these systems. In this paper we reflect about the usage scenarios of scientific workflow management based on the practical experience of heavy users of workflow technology from communities in three scientific domains: Astrophysics, Heliophysics and Biomedicine. We discuss the requirements regarding services and information to be provided by the workflow management system for each usage profile, and illustrate how these requirements are fulfilled by the tools these communities currently adopt. This paper contributes to the understanding of properties of future workflow management systems that are important to increase their adoption in a large variety of usage scenarios.