Applying DLs to workflow reuse and repurposing
Antoon Goderis, Ulrike Sattler, Carole Goble · Research Explorer (The University of Manchester) · 2005
allowing a scientist to describe and enact their experimental processes in a structured, repeatable and verifiable way. The my Grid (www.mygrid.org.uk) workbench, a set of components to build workflows in bioinformatics, currently allows access to a thousand globally distributed services and a hundred workflows, some of which orchestrate up to fifty services. Figure 2 shows the example of a my Grid workflow which gathers information about genetic sequences in support of research on Williams-Beuren syndrome [10]. Much of the research geared towards the construction of on-line processes (i.e. workflows) is led by a vision of automatic composition of services based on extensive formalisation (see for example www.daml.org/services/owl-s/pubarchive.html). Such research can be complemented with techniques that exploit those cases where existing workflows and fragments of workflows can be reused, thereby benefitting from hard-won human experience in composing services. A workflow fragment is a piece of an experimental description that is a coherent sub-workflow that makes sense to a domain specialist. Each fragment forms a