A Visual Scientific Workflow Designer for Chemists in Grid Environment

Scientific workflows are becoming increasingly important as a mechanism for orchestrating distributed resources such as computational devices, data, applications, and scientific instruments on the grid environment. BPEL is generally accepted as a de-facto standard for web-services composition. However, the lack of generic graphical interfaces that abstract the technical details for domain scientists has gradually become a major obstacle for them to easily master the workflow systems. This paper discusses our visual scientific workflow designer for Chemical e-Science Studies in the Grid environment. The designer is based on the ChinaGrid Support Platform (CGSP), and it allows scientists to compose the scientific workflow with a graphical representation of the BPEL specification by simply dragging and dropping the graphical elements within a canvas. We applied the designer to a Chemical case study and demonstrated the flexibility and simplicity for composing scientific workflows.