WOODSS and the Web: annotating and reusing scientific workflows

This paper discusses ongoing research on scientific workflows at the Institute of Computing, University of Campinas (IC - UNICAMP) Brazil. Our projects with bio-scientists have led us to develop a scientific workflow infrastructure named WOODSS. This framework has two main objectives in mind: to help scientists to specify and annotate their models and experiments; and to document collaborative efforts in scientific activities. In both contexts, workflows are annotated and stored in a database. This "annotated scientific workflow" database is treated as a repository of (sometimes incomplete) approaches to solving scientific problems. Thus, it serves two purposes: allows comparison of distinct solutions to a problem, and their designs; and provides reusable and executable building blocks to construct new scientific workflows, to meet specific needs. Annotations, moreover, allow further insight into methodology, success rates, underlying hypotheses and other issues in experimental activities.The many research challenges faced by us at the moment include: the extension of this framework to the Web, following Semantic Web standards; providing means of discovering workflow components on the Web for reuse; and taking advantage of planning in Artificial Intelligence to support composition mechanisms. This paper describes our efforts in these directions, tested over two domains - agro-environmental planning and bioinformatics.