Tools, Methods And Services Enhancing The Usage Of The Kepler-Based Scientific Workflow Framework

Scientific workflow systems are designed to compose and execute either a series of computational or data manipulation steps, or workflows in a scientific application. They are usually a part of a larger eScience environment. The usage of workflow systems, however very beneficial, is mostly not irrelevant for scientists. There are many requirements for additional functionalities around scientific workflows systems that need to be taken into account, like the ability of sharing workflows, provision of the user-friendly GUI tools for automation of some tasks or submission to distributed computing infrastructures, etc. In this paper we present tools developed in response to the requirements of three different scientific communities. These tools simplify and empower their work with the Kepler scientific workflow system. The usage of such tools and services is presented on Nanotechnology, Astronomy and Fusion scenarios examples.