Special issue: Second International Workshop on Workflow Management and Applications in Grid Environments (WaGe2007)

This special issue of Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience contains selected high-quality papers from the second International Workshop on Workflow Management and Applications in Grid Environments (WaGe2007), which was held on 17 August 2007 in Urumqi China [1]. The WaGe workshop series was aimed at providing an international forum for the presentation and discussion of research and development trends regarding workflow support in Grid environments. WaGe2007 attracted a number of international attendants. Deep discussion between attendants was actively performed. Especially, the discussion tried to view workflow management in Grid environments from different perspectives and areas. Different views can provide different potentials for further research and development. Grid workflow has been under investigation for several years [2–6]. In particular, the special issue titled Workflow in Grid Systems in Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience was a key step [7]. The special issue was edited by Professor Geoffrey C. Fox and Professor Dennis Gannon from Indiana University in the U.S.A. A follow-up was the special issue in the same journal for WSGE2006 (First International Workshop on Workflow Systems in Grid Environments) [8]. This WaGe2007 special issue is a further follow-up of the two special issues to further boost the research and development of workflow management and applications in Grid environments. Many research and development efforts have been made to workflow management and applications in Grid environments such as [2,4–6,9–15]. More and more people from different areas are trying to facilitate the techniques from their respective areas to tackle tough issues in Grid workflow area such as quality of service-based scheduling, data-intensive workflow modelling and semantic/knowledge management issues. Accordingly, this special issue tries to accommodate a range of papers from different perspectives and areas to provide some different views and hints for further Grid workflow research. This special issue contains eight papers based on those that were presented at WaGe2007. They are listed as [16–23]. Research problems in these papers have been analysed systematically. For specific approaches or models, evaluation has been performed to demonstrate their feasibility and advantages. Based on these, eight papers were selected and also peer reviewed thoroughly. They are briefed as follows. Cafaro et al. [16] view Grid workflow from an application perspective. Their paper designs and implements a Grid workflow execution engine. A specific example of bioinformatics in the Italian