The University of Southampton
University of Southampton Institutional Repository

Semantic Description, Publication and Discovery of Workflows in myGrid

Semantic Description, Publication and Discovery of Workflows in myGrid
Semantic Description, Publication and Discovery of Workflows in myGrid
The bioinformatics scientific process relies on in silico experiments, which are experiments executed in full in a computational environment. Scientists wish to encode the designs of these experiments as workflows because they provide minimal, declarative descriptions of the designs, overcoming many barriers to the sharing and re-use of these designs between scientists and enable the use of the most appropriate services available at any one time. We anticipate that the number of workflows will increase quickly as more scientists begin to make use of existing workflow construction tools to express their experiment designs. Discovery then becomes an increasingly hard problem, as it becomes more difficult for a scientist to identify the workflows relevant to their particular research goals amongst all those on offer. While many approaches exist for the publishing and discovery of services, there have been few attempts to address where and how authors of experimental designs should advertise the availability of their work or how relevant workflows can be discovered with minimal effort from the user. As the users designing and adapting experiments will not necessarily have a computer science background, we also have to consider how publishing and discovery can be achieved in such a way that they are not required to have detailed technical knowledge of workflow scripting languages. Furthermore, we believe they should be able to make use of others' expert knowledge (the semantics) of the given scientific domain. In this paper, we define the issues related to the semantic description, publishing and discovery of workflows, and demonstrate how the architecture created by the myGrid project aids scientists in this process. We give a walk-through of how users can construct, publish, annotate, discover and enact workflows via the user interfaces of the myGrid architecture; we then describe novel middleware protocols, making use of the Semantic Web technologies RDF and OWL to support workflow publishing and discovery.
workflow, semantic description, e-Science, bioinformatics, service discovery, Grid, personalisation
0 854 32 804
Miles, Simon
76c81b8e-1ca1-4d6d-ace3-922f03df97e0
Papay, Juri
21652b35-de29-439c-b343-cb3437ef2f9e
Wroe, Chris
db321c5b-06b0-49d0-9715-3ba458b85956
Lord, Phillip
479a8709-8124-4c1b-b34c-5b16f6b72671
Goble, Carole
8c248c0f-f19e-4dda-838b-77a89c5d3d38
Moreau, Luc
033c63dd-3fe9-4040-849f-dfccbe0406f8
Miles, Simon
76c81b8e-1ca1-4d6d-ace3-922f03df97e0
Papay, Juri
21652b35-de29-439c-b343-cb3437ef2f9e
Wroe, Chris
db321c5b-06b0-49d0-9715-3ba458b85956
Lord, Phillip
479a8709-8124-4c1b-b34c-5b16f6b72671
Goble, Carole
8c248c0f-f19e-4dda-838b-77a89c5d3d38
Moreau, Luc
033c63dd-3fe9-4040-849f-dfccbe0406f8

Miles, Simon, Papay, Juri, Wroe, Chris, Lord, Phillip, Goble, Carole and Moreau, Luc (2004) Semantic Description, Publication and Discovery of Workflows in myGrid

Record type: Monograph (Project Report)

Abstract

The bioinformatics scientific process relies on in silico experiments, which are experiments executed in full in a computational environment. Scientists wish to encode the designs of these experiments as workflows because they provide minimal, declarative descriptions of the designs, overcoming many barriers to the sharing and re-use of these designs between scientists and enable the use of the most appropriate services available at any one time. We anticipate that the number of workflows will increase quickly as more scientists begin to make use of existing workflow construction tools to express their experiment designs. Discovery then becomes an increasingly hard problem, as it becomes more difficult for a scientist to identify the workflows relevant to their particular research goals amongst all those on offer. While many approaches exist for the publishing and discovery of services, there have been few attempts to address where and how authors of experimental designs should advertise the availability of their work or how relevant workflows can be discovered with minimal effort from the user. As the users designing and adapting experiments will not necessarily have a computer science background, we also have to consider how publishing and discovery can be achieved in such a way that they are not required to have detailed technical knowledge of workflow scripting languages. Furthermore, we believe they should be able to make use of others' expert knowledge (the semantics) of the given scientific domain. In this paper, we define the issues related to the semantic description, publishing and discovery of workflows, and demonstrate how the architecture created by the myGrid project aids scientists in this process. We give a walk-through of how users can construct, publish, annotate, discover and enact workflows via the user interfaces of the myGrid architecture; we then describe novel middleware protocols, making use of the Semantic Web technologies RDF and OWL to support workflow publishing and discovery.

Text
ECSTR-IAM04-001.pdf - Accepted Manuscript
Download (2MB)

More information

Published date: August 2004
Keywords: workflow, semantic description, e-Science, bioinformatics, service discovery, Grid, personalisation
Organisations: Web & Internet Science, Electronics & Computer Science, IT Innovation

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 259798
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/259798
ISBN: 0 854 32 804
PURE UUID: 48aed93a-6014-4c72-a963-e4dcf91af827
ORCID for Luc Moreau: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-3494-120X

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 20 Aug 2004
Last modified: 14 Mar 2024 06:28

Export record

Contributors

Author: Simon Miles
Author: Juri Papay
Author: Chris Wroe
Author: Phillip Lord
Author: Carole Goble
Author: Luc Moreau ORCID iD

Download statistics

Downloads from ePrints over the past year. Other digital versions may also be available to download e.g. from the publisher's website.

View more statistics

Atom RSS 1.0 RSS 2.0

Contact ePrints Soton: eprints@soton.ac.uk

ePrints Soton supports OAI 2.0 with a base URL of http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/cgi/oai2

This repository has been built using EPrints software, developed at the University of Southampton, but available to everyone to use.

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue without changing your settings, we will assume that you are happy to receive cookies on the University of Southampton website.

×