Minutes of the Workflow Management-RG AD HOC Meeting
11th March - Room 3075 Humboldt University

The session is directed by Ewa Deelman.

The research group history is presented, together with the group
structure. Although three chairs are leading the group, no secretary has
been appointed. 

A review of the charter is presented. During the discussion a question
arise of which will be the mechanisms in the group: meetings? workshops?
There exists some consensus on the fact that a combination of both meetings
and workshops could be a right way.

A question is raised regarding if the distributed state management would
be taken into account in the group discussions. 

Also, it is stated that it would be important to track what other groups
are doing. 

Regarding a question about the group roadmap, the idea is to follow the
topics presented in the charter, focusing in a particular issue at each
time a doing a report. 

The results of the workshops could be published in special issues of
journals but also produce GGF reports. 

Also seems interesting to produce a survey of workflow systems. A
web-site maintained by Alek Slominski partially covers that subject. 

Also, exists interest on defining benchmarks. Some of the benchmarks
defined at the Grid Benchmarking RG can be used.

After the discussion, a set of different workflow systems or aspects are
presented.

First presentation by Alek Slominski presented  an update from the work
of BPEL. In his presentation Alek presented a summary of BPEL
implementations and a new approach: GPEL (Grid Process Execution
Language) which implements a subset of BPEL oriented to Grid
environments. 

Next, Andreas Hoheisel presented how Workflow Specification is tackled
in the Fraunhofer Resource Grid. In his approach, GADL is used as
specification language. GADL is a set of XML-based description
languages. Also, Petri Nets are used for modeling the workflow behavior,
and Globus 2.4 as underlying middleware.

The third presentation by Thomas Fahringer presented an UML based
approach to specify workflows. UML is used in this approach as an
abstract workflow language. This system has been used for medical
imaging applications. 

Finally, Gregor von Laszewski presented how Workfklow is specifies in
GridAnt and Karajan. The approach in this case is based in Ant and 
is very simple but powerful. 

The session ended at 12:00.