Seven bottlenecks to workflow reuse and repurposing

Abstract

To date on-line processes (i.e. workflows) built in e-Science have been the result of collaborative team efforts. As more of these workflows are built, scientists start sharing and reusing stand-alone compositions of services, or workflow fragments. They repurpose an existing workflow or workflow fragment by finding one that is close enough to be the basis of a new workflow for a different purpose, and making small changes to it. Such a "workflow by example" approach complements the popular view in the Semantic Web Services literature that on-line processes are constructed automatically from scratch, and could help bootstrap the Web of Science. Based on a comparison of e-Science middleware projects, this paper identifies seven bottlenecks to scalable reuse and repurposing. We include some thoughts on the applicability of using OWL for two bottlenecks: workflow fragment discovery and the ranking of fragments. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.