Mining workflow repositories for improving fragments reuse

Abstract

Public repositories of scientific and business workflows are gaining growing attention as a means to enable understanding, reuse and ultimately the reproducibility of the processes such workflows incarnate. However, as the number of workflows hosted by such repositories grows, their users face difficulties when it come to exploring and querying workflows. In this paper, we explore a functionality that can help repository administrators to index their workflows, and users to identify the workflows that are of interest to them. In particular, we investigate the problem of finding frequent and similar fragments in workflows using graph mining techniques. Our objective is not to come up with yet another graph mining or similarity technique. Instead, we explore different representations that can be used for encoding workflows before assessing their similarity taking into consideration the effectiveness and efficiency of the mining algorithm.