Scientific workflow system
workflow management in a scientific environment
A scientific workflow system is a specialized form of a workflow management system designed specifically to compose and execute a series of computational or data manipulation steps, or workflow, in a scientific application. Scientific workflow systems are generally developed for use by scientists from different disciplines like astronomy, earth science, and bioinformatics. All such systems are based on an abstract representation of how a computation proceeds in the form of a directed graph, where each node represents a task to be executed and edges represent either data flow or execution dependencies between different tasks. Each system typically provides a visual front-end, allowing the user to build and modify complex applications with little or no programming expertise.
Applications
Distributed scientists can collaborate on conducting large scale scientific experiments and knowledge discovery applications using distributed systems of computing resources, data sets, and devices. Scientific workflow systems play an important role in enabling this vision.
More specialized scientific workflow systems provide a visual programming front end enabling users to easily construct their applications as a visual graph by connecting nodes together, and tools have also been developed to build such applications in a platform-independent manner. Each directed edge in the graph of a workflow typically represents a connection from the output of one application to the input of the next. A sequence of such edges may be called a pipeline.
Scientific workflows
The simplest computerized scientific workflows are scripts that call in data, programs, and other inputs and produce outputs that might include visualizations and analytical results.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Scientific workflow system” is workflow management in a scientific environment. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Scientific, workflow and system, not as a finished interpretation.
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The date and method of observation matter as much as the stated conclusion, especially where classification or consensus has changed. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7433829. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Scientific workflow system” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.