Orchestration and Choreography : Standards , Tools and Technologies for Distributed Workflows

Workflow and the terms orchestration and choreography are confusing terms at the best of times. They all play a role in the structuring of systems and they are all a result of the need for abstraction and structural clarity of systems. There has been a lot effort over the last three years on both orchestration and choreography and tools and standards that govern their interoperability are close to maturation. In this lecture we shall look at workflow, orchestration and choreography with respect to the wider notion of Service Oriented Architecture and explain how they can be used, what they do and how they relate to one another. And all the time we shall keep in mind the notions of abstraction, structural clarity and domain relevance. During the course of this lecture we shall look at how these notions complement each other and how they can best be used to describe and execute workflows in a distributed service oriented architecture setting. We shall use some tools to demonstrate how they work and present some examples that have relevance to the domain of workflow in bioinformatic systems.