Goals
The EarthCube Workflow Community Group is holding a series of workshops to elicit requirements for workflows in geosciences, ascertain the state of the art and current practices, identify current gaps in both the use of and capabilities of current workflow systems in the earth sciences through use case studies, and identify grand challenges for the next decade along with the possible paths to addressing those challenges. A key result of this activity will be an initial roadmap document that will provide input to the EarthCube community at the planned EarthCube June 2012 meeting. The roadmap will serve as a living document created as a group effort with provisions and a process to update and extend it over time.
Outcomes
This group will generate an initial roadmap for workflows for the EarthCube community. An important outcome of this work will be a shared understanding and vocabulary for workflows, and an assessment of the particular challenges facing the geoscience community. Workflow technologies developed by different groups vary widely in their intended use, capabilities, and infrastructure. It is often difficult for scientists to map their problems to capabilities that workflow technologies can provide. This activity will address this fragmentation by providing a forum where the community can begin to create a common understanding of the role of workflow technologies in the EarthCube vision. It will also begin the process of identifying the challenges that the next generation of earth science research problems, instruments, models, resources, and cyberinfrastructure will place on current workflow systems. Identifying these challenges now will be crucial for the next generation of workflow technologies to anticipate and take advantage of disruptive trends over the next decade.
Impact
The planned roadmap will have broader impact across geosciences research, as EarthCube represents ocean, athmospheric, and earth sciences. The roadmap will also have implications for cyberinfrastructure and other computer science research. A better understanding and planning in the workflows area will also have an impact on scientific fields beyond geosciences. Workflow systems themselves pervade a broad range of computational science domains, therefore many workflow challenges will have relevance beyond the EarthCube initiative and benefit many scientific fields. We expect the outcomes of this workshop to impact the entire scientific workflow community.