Proposed GGF10 GCE Workflow Meeting
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Workflow is a critical part of the emerging Grid Computing Environments and captures the linkage of constituent services together in a hierarchical fashion to build larger composite services. Workflow captures "programming the Web or Grid" and encompasses a broad range of approaches with names like "Service Orchestration", "Service or Process Coordination", "Service Conversation", "Web or Grid Scripting", "Application Integration", or "Software Bus". One can identify at least four important aspects of workflow
1) User Environment or Workflow IDE (Integrated Development Environment)
2) Representation and language to express workflow
3) Translation or compilation
4) Runtime
Workflow overlaps with areas such as "distributed system programming" and "virtual data". 

The GCE workshop will build on two related workshops in this area
a) GGF9 Life Sciences workshop 
b) UK e-Science December 2003 workshop at Edinburgh
a) is focussed on identifying key requirements for Life Science Grids and b) has a UK flavor.

We suggest that workflow is a relatively immature field and it is necessary to gain experience with several different approaches to several different applications. One goal of the GGF10 workshop will be to collect a set of exemplar applications and their requirements generalizing the Life Science meeting which is gathering requirements in their application area. This could lead to either a "pencil and paper" or "real code" collection of workflow benchmarks. Given the diversity of service and workflow models one central task will be reach consensus on what such a benchmark set could look like in terms of both features covered and method of representing benchmark.

The meeting will have a mix of invited and contributed papers and will conclude with a panel on "Towards a Workflow Benchmark Suite". The meeting and panel conclusions will be summarized in a GGF informational document. Speakers will be invited to submit a paper for a Special Issue of Concurrency&Computation: Practice&Experience".

If approved by GGF, we will issue a CFP and discuss briefly at GCE meeting at GGF9. Invited talks could include both specific workflow projects and

1) Summary of Life Science and Edinburgh Meetings
2) Presentation(s) of commercial state of the art (IBM, Microsoft, HP ...)
3) Presentation from Advanced Programming Model RG on relationship to distributed systems
4) Presentation on Virtual Data
5) Presentation on "Why are we discussing this; it has all been solved by Python, Perl, Matlab, Mathematica ...."
6) Some "unbiased" review of field