InforSense is a world leader in the application of open discovery workflow systems to application integration and business process planning in information-rich organisations. Its role in the consortium is to provide the necessary grid infrastructure for the application of workflow management tools throughout the application areas. InforSense’s workflow technology was the winner of the IEEE high-performance computing challenge in 1998, 1999 and 2002, and thus the company is ideally qualified to defining workflow in the SIMDAT grid environment. An important requirement of SIMDAT to workflow is that it must be open in the sense that new applications and data formats/representations can be easily integrated into the system. This openness is crucial to deal with the heterogeneity of applications in different application field and InforSense DPML workflow language is ideal for this purpose.

Inforsense will extend its grid workflow systems with the following capabilities:

1. Provision of a mark-up language for flexible application integration and support for integration activities within all of the application clusters; 
2. A workflow resource mapping model to the grid;
3. A workflow monitoring system to control the activities involved in running a workflow, including gathering of all the resource information and scheduling the activities according to policies and resource climate;
4. A highly innovative Grid–based workflow warehousing system to manage the workflow. Such a workflow warehouse forms an important knowledge base where process knowledge of an organisation can be stored and retrieved. A very important research area is to provide a semantic-based index/retrieving facility where the meaning of a workflow is the base of identifying the workflow itself. Ontology on workflow will therefore be a pivotal research subject.

Initial work will focus on applications in the Pharmaceutical cluster before being extended to applications in the other clusters.

Inforsense website