Ptolemy II was developed by the members of the Ptolemy project at UC Berkley and was begun in 1997. Ptolemy-II is platform for a visual modeling tool written in Java. It was begun in at UC Berkley. Although not originally intended for scientific workflows, it provides a mature platform for building and executing workflows, and supports multiple models of computation.
Several recent SDM efforts in including [altintas02a], [ludaesher03], [mladen03], and [altintas03] have extended the PtolemyII
platform to allow for the draganddrop creation of scientific workflows from libraries of actors. The Ptolemy actor is often a wrapper around a call to web service or grid service.
Ptolemy leverages an XMLmeta language called
MoML to produce a workflow document describing the relationships of the entities, properties, and ports in a workflow. While the MoML description deals with the connections between actors on an very abstract level, Ptolemy-II offers several execution strategies (called "Domains") to actually interpretate the abstract Model as a Workflow. Among these domains are DE - Discrete Events, CT - Continuous Time, SDF - Synchronous Data Flow, PN - Process Network, … (see
Ptolemy-II Domains)
Presently, Ptolemy actor libraries exist for the domains of bioinformatics and ecology at [sdmnc] and [seek].
Resources
Related
BPMN
b_bprimal