An approach to enhancing workflows provenance by leveraging web 2.0 to increase information sharing, collaboration and reuse

Abstract

Web 2.0 promises a more enjoyable experience for creating content by users by providing easy-to-use information sharing and collaboration tools, and focusing on user-centered design. Provenance in Scientific Workflow Management is one kind of user-generated data that can benefit from using Web 2.0. We propose a simple set of Web 2.0 technologies that is simple to implement and can be immediately leveraged by scientific users. Using Atom Syndication Protocol to represent workflow state and its provenance users can easily disseminate their scientific results. Collaboration and authoring can be facilitated by using Atom Publishing Protocol and standard Web 2.0 blogging tools to publish and annotate provenance. Users can search stored provenance by using search engines. If search results are in standard Atom Syndication Protocol, for example when search engines support OpenSearch standard, then Atom feeds can be used to monitor provenance changes increasing the likelihood of discoveries. By using those Web 2.0 standards, the value of scientific provenance data increases by making it a natural part of growing a variety of user-generated scientific (and non-scientific) content. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.