This book is part of the “Communications in Computer and Information Science (CCIS)” series, which publishes peer-reviewed proceedings of conferences and workshops. In an edited collection, one normally expects some level of discontinuity and lack of integration, but in this book this lack of integration is quite pronounced. Each paper, however, is well written with expert-level precision and is very informative.

The book attempts to present a model-driven (and agile) approach to manage scientific workflows. The extreme model-driven design (XMDD) paradigm is utilized as an approach. In one sentence, XMDD is well summarized by Bernhard Steffen:

[The] conceptual backbone for the envisaged continuous model-driven engineering (CMDE) is the extreme model-driven development (XMDD) paradigm, which aims at continuously involving the customer/application expert throughout the whole systems’ life cycle including software maintenance and evolution. Characteristic for XMDD, which combines service and aspect orientation, model-driven design and ideas from extreme programming in order to achieve scalable Scrum-like agility, is its comprehensive accompanying model. [1]

For the uninitiated reader, a brief and complete introduction to XMDD with jABC can be found online [2].

The chapters are organized into three broad areas. The first is “Framework,” which contains four papers: “Scientific Workflows and XMDD”; “Modeling and Execution of Scientific Workflows with the jABC Framework”; “The Course’s SIB Libraries”; and “Lessons Learned.”

The second section is “Bioinformatics Applications,” which is composed of six papers: “Protein Classification Workflow”; “Data Mining for Unidentified Protein Sequences”; “Workflow for Rapid Metagenome Analysis”; “Constructing a Phylogenetic Tree”; “Exploratory Data Analysis”; and “Identification of Differentially Expressed Genes.”

The third section, “Geovisualization Applications,” contains nine papers: “Visualization of Data Transfer Paths”; “Spotlocator--Guess Where the Photo Was Taken!”; “Geocoder Accuracy Ranking”; “Web-Based Map Generalization Tools Put to the Test: A jABC Workflow”; “CREADED: Colored-Relief Application for Digital Elevation Data”; “A Workflow for Computing Potential Areas for Wind Turbines”; “Location Analysis for Placing Artificial Reefs”; “Creation of Topographic Maps”; and GraffDok--A Graffiti Documentation Application.“

In conclusion, this book is essentially a conference proceedings composed of well-written papers for specialists. I have also provided some links above as a background for nonexperts who are interested in reading some papers in this volume.