About Us

The Kepler project is a collaboration that embraces many science and engineering disciplines to produce the best open source scientific workflow system available by focusing the many talents of our many contributors.  Contributions to Kepler are governed by the Kepler Management Charter, which outlines the myriad ways in which Kepler Contributors might interact. Support for the Kepler project comes from a variety of institutions and projects that contribute development time and expertise to make Kepler great.  In addition, Kepler is supported by the NSF-funded Kepler/CORE team, which spans several of the key institutions that originated the Kepler project: UC Davis, UC Santa Barbara, and UC San Diego. The Kepler/CORE team is dedicated to refining, releasing, and supporting the Kepler software, as well as to enhancing the attributes and functions of the system most important for wide-scale adoption and long-term sustainability.

The Kepler project's mission is to increase the productivity of researchers who employ the Kepler software, facilitating discovery and collaboration both within and across disciplines, and helping scientists leverage developments and expertise in other domains. In addition, we hope that Kepler's solid computer science underpinnings will lead to further breakthroughs and innovations in the fields of scientific data management, data provenance, and collaborative scientific computing.

To this end, the goal of future Kepler development is to (i) define a single, unified vision and architecture for the Kepler system with a clearly defined kernel of capabilities applicable to all projects; (ii) enable multiple groups in a number of distinct scientific disciplines to easily create, support, and make available domain-specific Kepler extensions; (iii) identify and develop critical new core features that will make Kepler a more comprehensive scientific workflow system offering full support for data, workflow, service, and project management.

 Team members identify new development requirements and priorities by meeting with users currently applying Kepler to specific research domains (Kepler "stakeholders"), as well as with potential future users. To learn more about how you can become involved in the development process, either as a Kepler user or developer, please see Get Involved.