Scientific workflow management: between generality and applicability

In a problem solving environment (PSE), a scientific workflow management system (SWMS) provides a meta environment for managing activities and data in scientific experiments, for prototyping experimental computing systems and for orchestrating the runtime system behaviour. The realisation of a SWMS is often driven by domain specific applications and thus is at application level. Investigating the common characteristics in domain specific SWMSs and encapsulating them in a generic framework improve the reusability of the SWMS components and reduce the costs for introducing an e-science framework in a new science domain. In this position paper, we present our research in an ongoing project: virtual laboratory for e-science (VL-e). In the VL-e project, we are building a generic e-science framework which would support scientists from different domains to share their knowledge and to perform specific experiments. We summarise the lessons we have learned from a previous VL-e implementation, and discuss the plan for improving the quality of the SWMS support in the VL-e framework.