Integrating OGSA-DAI to computational Grid workflows

Although many scientific applications rely on data stored in databases, most work-flow management systems are not capable of establishing database connections during workflow execution. For this reason eScientists have to use different tools before workflow submission to access their data-sets and gather the required data on which they want to carry out computational experiments. OGSA-DAI is a good candidate to use as a middleware providing access to several structured and semi-structured database products through web/grid services. The integration technique and its reference implementation described in this paper enables eScientists to reach databases via OGSA-DAI within their scientific workflows at runtime and gives a general solution which can be adopted by any workflow management system