Abstract (EN)

Workflow specification, in science as in business, can be a difficult task, since it requires a deep knowledge of the domain to be able to model the chaining of the steps that compose the process of interest, as well as awareness of the computational tools, e.g., services, that can be utilized to enact such steps. To assist designers in this task, we investigate in this paper a methodology that consists in exploiting existing workflow specifications that are stored and shared in repositories, to identify workflow fragments that can be re-utilized and re-purposed by designers when specifying new workflows. Specifically, we present a method for identifying fragments that are frequently used across workflows in existing repositories, and therefore are likely to incarnate patterns that can be reused in new workflows. We present a keyword-based search method for identifying the fragments that are relevant for the needs of a given workflow designer. We go on to present an algorithm for composing the retrieved fragments with the initial (incomplete) workflow that the user designed, based on compatibility rules that we identified, and showcase how the algorithm operates using an example from eScience.