A model for information and action flows connecting science gateways to distributed computing infrastructures

To support scientists of different disciplines, different fields of Computer Science have developed tools and infrastructures with the aim of giving them access to vast computational resources in the easiest possible way. Such extremely complex structures have evolved naturally in the last decades both in depth and breath and, in addition to scientists, a plethora of heterogeneous actors (system administrators, developers, etc.) cooperate and interact with them. This complex and unstructured flow of actions and information poses difficulties in the development and usage of Science Gateways because information can be missing or hard to isolate at the right layer. In this paper, we aim to start a discussion on how to best manage these information flows to help the design and implementation of more flexible and userfriendly Science Gateways and workflow management systems in the future.