Assisting Scientists with Complex Data Analysis Tasks through Semantic Workflows

To assist scientists in data analysis tasks, we have developed semantic workflow representations that support automatic constraint propagation and reasoning algorithms to manage constraints among the individual workflow steps. Semantic constraints can be used to represent requirements of input datasets as well as best practices for the method represented in a workflow. We demonstrate how the Wings workflow system uses semantic workflows to assist users in creating workflows while validating that the workflows comply with the requirements of the software components and datasets. Wings reasons over semantic workflow representations that consist of both a traditional dataflow graph as well as a network of constraints on the data and components of the workflow.