(O4a.4) Workflow in Astronomy : the VO France Workflow Working Group experience
Andre Schaaff (Observatoire de Strasbourg)
Franck Le Petit (Observatoire de Paris)
Philippe Prugniel (Observatoire de Lyon)
Eric Slezak (Observatoire de la Cote d’Azur)
Christian Surace (Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille)
The French Action Spécifique Observatoires Virtuels has created the Workflow Working Group in 2005. Its aim is to explore the use of the Workflow paradigm in the astronomical domain. The first consensus was the definition of a Workflow as a sequence of tasks realized in a controlled context (at various levels: intelligence in the choice of the algorithms, flow control, etc.), based on use cases studies, in an architecture which takes into account VO standards. The current roadmap is to provide scientific use cases in several domains (image, spectrum, simulation, data mining, etc.) and to improve them with VO (and other) existing tools. Another important point is to develop collaborations with the IT community (links to EGEE, ...). Use cases are useful to compare the pertinence of the possible workflow models and to understand how to implement it as efficiently as possible with the existing tools (ex. : AstroGrid, AÏDA, WebCom-G, etc.). The execution (local machine, cluster, grid) through this kind of tools and the use of VO functionalities (Web Services, GRID, VOSpace, etc.) becomes almost transparent. We are now focusing on the following topics : extension of the use case definition to other domains, definition of the common parts of use cases (spectrum, image, etc.), workflow langage interoperability, creation of a library of modules.
All informations concerning the working group are available on the OV France TWiki at : http://www.france-ov.org/twiki/bin/view/GROUPEStravail/Workflow