Developing scientific experiments involve geographically distributed and heterogeneous resources such as computational systems, scientific instruments, databases, sensors, software components, networks, and people. Such large-scale and enhanced scientific experiments are carried out via collaborations on a global scale. Those resources must be modeled and managed in a similar way we model software development and data through software engineering processes and database techniques.

Current advances in Software Engineering and Database research, including ontologies, scientific process/workflow modeling, web services, software components management, grid computing, resource modeling, process and data provenance, data curation, among others can help transforming ad-hoc experiments composition and management into large scale experiments production. Several national and international projects around the world have been initiated to carry out research and innovation activities that will transform the goal of e-Science and Grid computing into a reality.

The 2007 e-Science workshop aims at bringing together recent developments in databases and software engineering towards a computerized infrastructure to accomplish science in the large, supporting the next generation of scientific research and experiments. The definition, execution and management of scientific experiments can no longer be developed in an ad-hoc manner. The topic of e-science or cyberinfraestructure is part of the "Grand Challenges in Computer Science Research in Brazil – 2006 – 2016" report from the Brazilian Computer Society. Recently, in December 2006, the "Computação Brasil" magazine has devoted a special issue to the topic of e-science where several developments and research activities have been discussed. This workshop serves as a forum to present ongoing efforts of the latest research and product/tool developments, and highlights related activities from the Brazilian and international community.

This is an active area of research, as can be seen by the several events devoted to this subject, particularly in the Database conferences (see list below). We would like to particularly gather the Brazilian researchers from the software engineering area with the database community to foster the modeling initiatives of the two areas, the interdisciplinary area of Web semantics and the recent advances in software engineering, mainly those from the experimental software engineering field. This focus on combining SE and DB on the same e-science spot has not been tried on current efforts in conferences.