Towards workflow ecosystems through standard representations

Abstract

Workflows are increasingly used to manage and share scientific
computations and methods. Workflow tools can be used to design,
validate, execute and visualize scientific workflows and their
execution results. Other tools manage workflow libraries or mine
their contents. There has been a lot of recent work on workflow
system integration as well as common workflow interlinguas, but
the interoperability among workflow systems remains a challenge.
Ideally, these tools would form a workflow ecosystem such that it
should be possible to create a workflow with a tool, execute it
with another, visualize it with another, and use yet another tool to
mine a repository of such workflows or their executions. In this
paper, we describe our approach to create a workflow ecosystem
through the use of standard models for provenance (OPM and
W3C PROV) and extensions (P-PLAN and OPMW) to represent
workflows. The ecosystem integrates different workflow tools
with diverse functions (workflow generation, execution,
browsing, mining, and visualization) created by a variety of
research groups. This is, to our knowledge, the first time that such
a variety of workflow systems and functions are integrated.