FOSS Geospatial Libraries In Scienti c Work ow Environments: Experiences and Directions

In numerous research elds, scientists are increasingly turning to e-science and specifically scienti c work ows as a way of improving, broadening and hastening their results. Enhanced collaboration, on-demand access to tools, data and high performance processing facilities are some of the gains to be made. Scienti c work ows are concerned with, amongst others, supporting the repeatability and provenance of experiments. Scienti c work ows have had a measure of success in the astronomy, bio-informatics, chem-informatics, geophysics and eco-informatics domains [Gil, et. al., 2007]. This paper describes our initial investigations into developing geospatial Scienti c Work ows to support researchers in exploring, integrating and visualising Earth Observation and GIS data in conjunction with other research data. We describe some of the functionalities we require in the context of three sets of research endeavour wild re research, ood modelling and the linking of disease outbreaks to multi-scale environmental conditions. We note the relative lack of support for geospatial data, services and functions within some of the FOSS Scienti c Work ow packages. This paper highlights challenges and results of utilising various FOSS geospatial libraries within these Scienti c Work ow environments.