Malcolm Atkinson

Rui Zhao, Malcolm Atkinson

With the needs of science and business, data sharing and re-use has become an intensive activity for various areas. In many cases, governance imposes rules concerning data use, but there is no existing computational technique to help data-users comply with such rules. We argue that intelligent systems can be used to improve the situation, by recording provenance records during processing, encoding the rules and performing reasoning. We present our initial work, designing formal models for data rules and flow rules and the reasoning system, as the first step towards helping data providers and data users sustain productive relationships.

Gary A. McGilvary, Malcolm Atkinson, Sandra Gesing et al.

The Grid and Cloud User Support Environment (gUSE) enables users convenient and easy access to grid and cloud infrastructures by providing a general purpose, workflow-oriented graphical user interface to create and run workflows on various Distributed Computing Infrastructures (DCIs). Its arrangements for creating and modifying existing workflows are, however, non-intuitive and cumbersome due to the technologies and architecture employed by gUSE. In this paper, we outline the first integrated web-based workflow editor for gUSE with the aim of improving the user experience for those with industrial data workflows and the wider gUSE community. We report initial assessments of the editor's utility based on users' feedback. We argue that combining access to diverse scalable resources with improved workflow creation tools is important for all big data applications and research infrastructures.