Start of a new research project – Wf4Ever

2010-12-14

Start of a new research project – Wf4Ever
In early December in Madrit a meeting initiating a new research project called Wf4Ever was held. It aims at providing the methods and tools required to ensure the long-term storage of scientific workflows in order to support the scientific discovery process and the development of new scientific assets.

Wf4Ever is a research project funded under the 7th Framework Program of the European Commission. It aims at providing the methods and tools required to ensure the long-term preservation of scientific workflows in order to support the scientific discovery process and the development of new scientific assets. Wf4Ever will:

  • develop new models, techniques and tools for the preservation of scientific workflows, including the novel definition of a Research Object, which packages workflow descriptions, the provenance of their executions, and links to all the related resources upon which they depend;
  • develop strategies for sharing and reusing workflows or workflow fragments and patterns, including mechanisms for personalised workflow recommendation based on workflow descriptions, users’ collective behaviour, and social information;
  • propose methods and tools to proactively preserve and inspect workflow integrity and authenticity through the evaluation of workflow information quality, based on the provenance of workflows and their research objects;
  • develop a software architecture and reference implementation for the preservation of scientific workflows, which will extend one of the most widely deployed scientific workflow sharing infrastructures (myExperiment) with preservation capabilities that consider the complexity of scientific workflows and their related objects.

Wf4Ever will be evaluated in two workflow-intensive use cases in the domains of Astronomomy and Genomics.
The coordinator of this project is iSOCO: Intelligent Software Components S.A., a company from Spain. Besides iSOCO and PSNC, other project partners are: University of Manchester, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, University of Oxford, Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía and Leiden University Medical Centre.

PSNC in this project will be responsible for the workpackage “Software architecture and technology” and will be also significantly involved in “Workflow Evolution, Sharing and Collaboration” workpackage. Some of the software components developed for the Wf4Ever system will be based on the dLibra system developed by PSNC.