Search, Adapt, and Reuse: The Future of Scientific Workflows
Search, Adapt, and Reuse: The Future of Scientific Workflows
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DOI：
10.1145/2034863.2034865
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发表时间：
2011-06-01
期刊：
影响因子：
1.1
通讯作者：
Leser, Ulf
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Cohen-Boulakia, Sarah;Leser, Ulf
在过去的几年中，许多科学工作流管理系统（SciWFM）已经达到成熟的状态，应该允许它们在生产风格的环境中使用。这对生命科学来说尤其如此，但是SciWFM在地球物理或气候研究等领域也引起了相当大的关注。这些发展，伴随着包装为（web）服务的分析工具的日益可用性，是由一系列非常有趣的承诺驱动的：最终用户将被授权开发他们自己的管道；通过更容易地集成到自定义工作流中，服务的重用将得到增强；开发分析管道所需的时间将减少；等。但是，尽管做出了种种努力，SciWFM仍未在其目标受众中得到广泛接受。在本文中，我们认为只有将研究和开发的重点从开发和运行工作流的方法转移到搜索、调整和重用现有工作流上，SciWFM才能得到更广泛的采用。只有通过这种转变，SciWFM才能接触到实际执行科学分析的广大领域科学家——而他们自己对开发这些科学家几乎没有兴趣。为此，SciWFM需要与社区范围的工作流存储库相结合，允许用户为他们的科学需求找到解决方案（编码为工作流）。在这篇愿景论文中，我们展示了这些发展已经开始的方式和地点，并强调了出现的新研究问题。
Over the last years, a number of scientific workflow management systems (SciWFM) have been brought to a state of maturity that should permit their usage in a production-style environment. This is especially true for the Life Sciences, but SciWFM also attract considerable attention in fields like geophysics or climate research. These developments, accompanied by the growing availability of analytical tools wrapped as (web) services, were driven by a series of very interesting promises: End users will be empowered to develop their own pipelines; reuse of services will be enhanced by easier integration into custom workflows; time necessary for developing analysis pipelines will decrease; etc. But despite all efforts, SciWFM have not yet found widespread acceptance in their intended audience. In this paper, we argue that a wider adoption of SciWFM will only be achieved if the focus of research and development is shifted from methods for developing and running workflows to searching, adapting, and reusing existing workflows. Only by this shift can SciWFM outreach to the mass of domain scientists actually performing scientific analysis - and with little interest in developing them themselves. To this end, SciWFM need to be combined with community-wide workflow repositories allowing users to find solutions for their scientific needs (coded as a workflow). In this vision paper, we show how and where such developments have already started and highlight new research questions arising.