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Collaborative Workflow Design with HOBBES

Online Demo

Workflow Management is a major aspect of enterprise systems and is gaining more and more importance in scientific and Grid computing. The workflow design process can involve people from very different backgrounds. Though some business people and scientists are used to work with graphical workflow editors, it cannot be expected that they will fully comprehend the details of a workflow language like BPEL (Business Process Execution Language). Thus, we have to distinguish between domain and grid experts involved in workflow design. Domain experts bring in their knowledge about the high-level scientific, engineering or business processes to be modeled, while grid experts utilize their knowledge about grid infrastructure and implementation details.

Additionally, workflows are often supposed to integrate capabilities and resources of distributed sites. For example, the basic activities of a workflow can include services provided by different vendors, business units, or research groups. Thus, the correct integration of these services may require special knowledge only available at a remote site. Also, workflow design is often the most dynamic part in building and executing advanced grid applications. All these circumstances drive the demand for tool support for workflow design with sophisticated collaborative features.

HOBBES is a workflow design tool which especially supports a collaborative workflow design process by enabling easy team creation, synchronous collaboration, locking workflow-parts, and by providing a rich Web based user interface. Besides collaborative BPEL design features it provides tightly integrated application specific design tools located at a higher level of abstraction, giving domain experts a familiar working place. An online demo of HOBBES can be accessed here.

BPEL View

Domain Specific View (BioMoby Services)

Selected Publications:

• M. Held, W. Blochinger, and M. Werning. Bioinformatics Workflows with Calvin. In Tenth International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering (WISE), number 5802 in LNCS, pages 581-588, Poznen Poland, October 2009, Springer-Verlag.
• M. Held and W. Blochinger. Structured collaborative workflow design. Future Generation Computer Systems - The International Journal of Grid Computing: Theory, Methods and Applications, 25(6):638-653, 2009.
• M. Held and W. Blochinger. Collaborative BPEL design with a rich internet application. In Proc. of the Eighth IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGrid 2008), pages 202-209, Lyon, France, May 2008.