Publications

I. Foster, "Service-Oriented Science," Preprint ANL/MCS-P1249-0405, April 2005. [pdf]

New information architectures enable new approaches to publishing and accessing valuable data and programs. So-called service-oriented architectures define standard interfaces and protocols that allow developers to encapsulate information tools as services that clients can access without knowledge of, or control over, their internal workings. Thus, tools formerly only accessible to the specialist can be made available to all, previously manual data processing and analysis tasks can be automated by having services access services. Such service-oriented approaches to science are already being applied successfully, in some cases at substantial scales, but significant further effort is required before these approaches are applied routinely across many disciplines. Grid technologies can accelerate the development and adoption of service-oriented science, by enabling a separation of concerns between discipline-specific content and domain-independent software and hardware infrastructure.