A Survey on Scientific-Workflow Techniques for E-science in Astronomy

There is a great demand for astronomers to process and analyze mass data which distribute all over the word through e-Science technology. Virtual observatory (VO) technology, quickly developed in recent three years, is an effective utility to support the astronomical researches. VO consists of distributed data, component and service library and distributed services schedule. In the construction of VO, scientific workflow technique is the core component and typically used in flow customization, allocation in task and data provenance. In this study, we investigate the relational literatures and present a concise survey of existing scientific workflow technique in virtual observatory. A number of drawbacks and suggestions are made for future development of scientific workflow systems in virtual observatory.