Automatic portal generation based on XML workflow description

This dissertation investigates the automatic generation of computing portals based on XML workflow descriptions. To this end, a software system is designed, implemented and evaluated that allows end-users to build their own customized portal for managing and executing distributed scientific and engineering computations in a service-oriented environment. The whole process of the computation is represented as a data-driven workflow. The portal technique provides a user-friendly problem-solving environment that addresses job assignment, job submission and job feedback. An advantage of this approach is that the complexity of the workflow execution in the distributed environment is hidden from the user. However, the manual development and configuration of the application portal requires considerable expertise in web portal techniques, which most scientific end-users do not have. This dissertation address this problem by describing a tool chain consisting of three tools to achieve automatic portal generation and configuration. In addition, this dissertation presents a mapping of each element of WSDL to the UDDI data model, the conversion from the data-flow workflow to control-flow workflow by using XSLT, an implementation of a drag-and-drop visual programming environment for the generation of a workflow skeleton, and a methodology for the automatic layout of portlets in a portal framework.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Automatic portal generation based on workflow description

Distributed scientific and engineering computations on service-oriented architectures are often represented as data-driven workflows. Workflows are a convenient abstraction that allows users to compose applications in a visual programming environment, and execute them by means of a workflow execution engine. For a large class of scientific applications web-based portals can provide a user-friendly problem-solving environment that hides the complexities of executing workflow applications in a distributed environment. However, the creation and configuration of an application portal requires considerable expertise in portal technologies, which scientific end-users generally do not have. To address this problem this paper presents tools for automatically converting a workflow into a fully configured portal which can then be used to execute the workflow

Automatic portal generation based on XML workflow description

This dissertation investigates the automatic generation of computing portals based on XML workflow descriptions. To this end, a software system is designed, implemented and evaluated that allows end-users to build their own customized portal for managing and executing distributed scientific and engineering computations in a service-oriented environment. The whole process of the computation is represented as a data-driven workflow. The portal technique provides a user-friendly problem-solving environment that addresses job assignment, job submission and job feedback. An advantage of this approach is that the complexity of the workflow execution in the distributed environment is hidden from the user. However, the manual development and configuration of the application portal requires considerable expertise in web portal techniques, which most scientific end-users do not have. This dissertation address this problem by describing a tool chain consisting of three tools to achieve automatic portal generation and configuration. In addition, this dissertation presents a mapping of each element of WSDL to the UDDI data model, the conversion from the data-flow workflow to control-flow workflow by using XSLT, an implementation of a drag-and-drop visual programming environment for the generation of a workflow skeleton, and a methodology for the automatic layout of portlets in a portal framework