Objectives

WP9 aims at developing methods enabling workflow sharing and reproducibility of results. To enable the sharing of workflows, and make science reproducible, novel methods are needed to enable semantic annotation of workflows and collect provenance information. To achieve this goal methods for supporting cooperative experiments and transfer of knowledge among scientists have to be studied in depth using Web 2.0, and tools developed by the Computer Supported Cooperative Work society.

Main task

The main task of the AiO is to define generic metadata ontology, schema, and workflow templates that describe the workflow design/pattern and the application and data sources. New methods and tools of domain-oriented semantic descriptions of basic application modules, which, together with knowledge gathered, may result in facilitating an automatic construction of workflow applications. The second task is to apply these methods to improve interoperability among different workflow systems to be achieved through the workflowBus concept. Seamless data integration mechanisms allowing the aggregation of multi-format and multi-source data into a single coherent schema while preserving the autonomy of underlying data sources will also be investigated and developed.

The AiO in WP9 will collaborate in particular with WP24.3 in P24, which will provide real requirements and driving use cases. Within P20, the AiO will exploit possible outcomes in WP8, on workflow modeling, and provide generic services that can help other work packages in P20 to capture provenance information.