Discovery Net

Discovery Net is one of the earliest examples of a scientific workflow system allowing users to coordinate the execution of remote services based on Web service and Grid Services (OGSA and Open Grid Services Architecture) standards. The system was designed and implemented at Imperial College London as part of the Discovery Net pilot project funded by the UK e-Science Programme (E-Science#The UK e-Science programme). Many of the concepts pioneered by Discovery Net have been later incorporated into a variety of other scientific workflow systems.

The Discovery Net system was developed as part of the Discovery Net pilot project (2001–2005), a £2m research project funded by the EPSRC under the UK e-Science Programme (E-Science#The UK e-Science programme). The research on the project was conducted at Imperial College London as a collaboration between the Departments of Computing, Physics, Biochemistry and Earth Science & Engineering. Being a single institution project, the project was unique compared to the other 10 pilot projects funded by the EPSRC which were all multi-institutional.

The aims of the Discovery Net project were to investigate and address the key issues in developing of an e-Science platform for scientific discovery from the data generated by a wide variety of high throughput devices. It originally considered requirements from applications in life science, geo-hazard monitoring, environmental modelling and renewable energy. The project successfully delivered on all its objectives including the development of the Discovery Net workflow platform and workflow system. Over the years the system evolved to address applications in many other areas including bioinformatics, cheminformatics, health informatics, text mining and financial and business applications.

The Discovery Net system developed within the project is one of the earliest examples of scientific workflow systems. It is an e-Science platform based on a workflow model supporting the integration of distributed data sources and analytical tools thus enabling the end-users to derive new knowledge from devices, sensors, databases, analysis components and computational resources that reside across the Internet or grid.

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