Science gateway workshops 2014 special issue conference publications

Science gateways are a solution for user communities to access applications and data via a graphical user interface. These graphical user interfaces hide the underlying infrastructure, as far as feasible and as far as desired by the users. In general, science gateways offer a single point of entry to create and/or analyze domain-specific data. Their core goal is to increase the usability and accessibility of computational tools and digitized data as well as to leverage reproducibility of scientific processes. While the user interfaces are especially tailored to the specific demands of a user community, the underlying infrastructures, for example, national or international distributed computing infrastructures (e.g., XSEDE), are mainly applicable for a wide range of use cases. Thus, science gateway frameworks and science gateway APIs, which offer building blocks for the management of jobs and data within such infrastructures, ease the implementation of science gateways for developers. The latter can focus on the domain-specific demands while reusing or extending available building blocks. The contributions to this special issue present the current state-of-the-art research and elucidate trends in the area of science gateways as well as demonstrate available solutions for the users. Submissions are grouped in five general areas: science gateway use and sustainability, generic development frameworks, novel workflow-oriented approaches, data management, and use cases from diverse domains. The statistics illuminate among other topics the increased usage of science gateways, which is also reflected in high number of submissions demonstrating specific use cases. Consequently, sustainability approaches have found their way into the special issue reflected not only in a submission about a model for sustainability but also in numerous submissions on developments and enhancements for generic building blocks of diverse existing mature science gateway frameworks and APIs. While novel approaches for workflow management and data management can be also considered under the enhancements for generic building blocks addressing new technologies such as mobile applications, they have already been core subjects for a couple of years and are presented in own sections emphasizing their importance for the science gateway community.