Kepler WebView: A lightweight, portable framework for constructing real-time web interfaces of scientific workflows

Abstract

Modern web technologies facilitate the creation of high-quality data visualizations, and rich, interactive components across a wide variety of devices. Scientific workflow systems can greatly benefit from these technologies by giving scientists a better understanding of their data or model leading to new insights. While several projects have enabled web access to scientific workflow systems, they are primarily organized as a large portal server encapsulating the workflow engine. In this vision paper, we propose the design for Kepler WebView, a lightweight framework that integrates web technologies with the Kepler Scientific Workflow System. By embedding a web server in the Kepler process, Kepler WebView enables a wide variety of usage scenarios that would be difficult or impossible using the portal model.