Confucius: A Scientific Collaboration System Using Collaborative Scientific Workflows

Abstract

Abstract-Large-scale scientific data management and analysis usually relies on many distributed scientists with diverse expertise. In recent years, such a collaborative effort is often composed and automated into a dataflow-oriented process, a so-called scientific workflow. However, existing scientific workflow tools are single user-oriented and do not support collaborative scientific workflow composition, execution, and management among multiple distributed scientists. In this paper, we report our study of collaboration protocols towards building a tool supporting collaborative scientific workflow composition. Based on a scientific collaboration ontology, we propose a collaboration model supported by a set of collaboration primitives and patterns. The collaboration protocols are then applied to support effective concurrency control in the process of collaborative workflow composition.

Supporting End-User Service Composition: A Systematic Review of Current Activities and Tools

“…For example, Kepler [4], Co-Taverna [17], Confucius [19], and VIEW [12] all provide graphical workflow editor to users to help them define their scientific workflows.…”

“…Triana [3], DoCoSOC [33], HyperMash [13], Co-Taverna [17], and Confucius [19] are all built to enable multiple users to work either synchronously or asynchronously on a same mashup project. It is important to understand that both asynchronous and synchronous collaborations should be explicitly assisted by the system as a function/feature, which means the collaboration achieved by, for example, making a copy of a project in an USB disk and then handing in it to another person does not count.…”

A Granular Concurrency Control for Collaborative Scientific Workflow Composition

“…We have previously presented a database locking scheme in [13] to support simple workflow composition, which is a directed acyclic graph (DAG) consisting of a set of workflow tasks and a set of data links. All workflows are considered independent from each other.…”

Collaborative scientific workflows supporting collaborative science

“…We have also developed Confucius 1.0 [83,84], a prototyping system supporting collaborative composition of scientific workflows, built upon the Taverna [3] system. Using a client/server model, multiple scientists may join in a shared session to design scientific workflows collaboratively.…”