A dynamic data integration approach to build scientific workflow systems

Abstract

The need for collaboration between individual scientific fields increases with the wish for more global engineering optimizations and assessment requirements. Since areas of research become more and more fine-grained domains of there own, it is still very desirable to cooperate with other experts with more chance than ever to gain synergies when science is scattered as today. But this exchange of knowl- edge comes only into consideration if it can be used in a simple way with at most an moderate initial effort. To this end a framework is developed that lets scientists easily use knowledge of others without the need to understand their work and technology completely. Furthermore a generic common data format based on XML technology is devel- oped for exchanging and storing data between different domain-specific applications. To support all implementers, a twofold abstraction layer was introduced to encapsulate their knowledge shielding it from the technical environment.