An approach towards automatic workflow composition through information retrieval

Abstract

Understanding how to design, manage, and execute scientific workflows has become increasingly esoteric. Yet, despite the development of scientific workflow management systems, which have simplified workflow planning to some extent, a means to reduce the complexity of user interaction without forfeiting some robustness has been elusive. We believe that a keyword interface may be highly beneficial to common users in need of information which requires workflow planning and execution. In this paper, we describe a system that can automatically compose a set of relevant workflows, which may or may not have been previously defined by other users, given only a keyword query. We present a way to index data sets and Web services (utilized to compose workflows in our system) on their ontological attributes. This ontology allows us to facilitate an IR-based workflow retrieval model. We conducted a case study in geoinformatics with a set of real geospatial Web services, data, and their metadata annotations. our system was capable of answering six keyword queries with fast search times (2.16ms on average) and relatively high Top-N precision values: 78%, 77.3%, and 76.2% for the Top 3, 5, and 10 retrieved workflows respectively.