A Generic Framework for Building Services and Scientific Workflows for the Grid

Web Service architectures have gained popularity in recent years because they allow software and services from various organizations to be combined easily to provide integrated and distributed applications. However, most applications developed and used by scientific communities are not Web Service oriented and there is a growing need to integrate them into Grid applications based on Web Service architectures. But are scientific communities willing to rewrite each of their applications as a Web Service? Do they want to write complex software to manage user authentication and authorization? Do they want to write complex interfaces between applications to manage interactions between them? Can they afford to keep up with rapidly changing service-oriented technologies today? What they do want is to be able to do experiments of ever increasing complexity using scientific workflows. In this paper we describe a framework that allows scientists to wrap their existing applications as Web Services without having to write any extra code or modify their applications in any way. The framework also allows scientists, educational users and other users to discover these application services, interact with them and compose scientific workflows from the convenience of a Grid Portal.