Direct data transfer between SOAP web services in Orchestration

Abstract

In scientific data analysis, workflows are used to integrate and coordinate resources such as databases and tools. Workflows are normally executed by an orchestrator that invokes component services and mediates data transport between them. Scientific data are frequently large, and brokering large data increases the load on the orchestrator and reduces workflow performance. To remedy this problem, we demonstrate how plain SOAP web services can be tailored to support direct service-to-service data transport, thus allowing the orchestrator to delegate the data-flow. We formally define a data-flow delegation message, develop an XML schema for it, and analyze performance improvement of data-flow delegation empirically in comparison with the regular orchestration using an example bioinformatics workflow.