Scientific workflows: More e-science mileage from cyberinfrastructure

We view scientific workflows as the domain scientist's way to harness cyberinfrastructure for e-Science. Domain scientists are often interested in "end-to-end" frameworks which include data acquisition, transformation, analysis, visualization, and other steps. While there is no lack of technologies and standards to choose from, a simple, unified framework combining data modeling and processoriented modeling and design of scientific workflows has yet to emerge. Towards this end, we introduce a number of concepts such as models of computation and provenance, actor-oriented modeling, adapters, hybrid types, and higher-order components, and then outline a particular composition of some of these concepts, yielding a promising new synthesis for describing scientific workflows, i.e., Collection-Oriented Modeling and Design (COMAD).