Unified Programming Model for Instrument-driven e- Science Workflows?

The scientific knowledge discovery process has been aided recently by advances in cyberinfrastructure that automate the execution of data retrieval, modeling and analysis tasks typically undertaken during scientific exploration. But these infrastructures lack a generalized programming model for integrating real time data from sensors and instruments into the analysis process. In this ongoing work we examine two approaches to stream processing, a rule system and a query language-based system, and argue that either can be made suitable for our user base with enough hand-written code, but can either become as accepted as workflow systems in the science community? What will that take?