Wf4Ever · Advanced Workflow Preservation Technologies for Enhanced Science

Wf4Ever 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. Such models will also include models for repeatability and reproducibility, and models for workflow abstraction, to facilitate workflow classification and indexing, comparison, and similarity detection between pairs of existing workflows in the library. Wf4Ever will also 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. Finally, Wf4Ever will 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 and described in new vocabularies for the representation of the provenance of research objects in digital preservation systems. Wf4Ever will develop a software architecture and reference implementation for the preservationof 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. This software system will thus leverage the advances done on workflow lifecycle management, collaboration and sharing support, and integrity and authenticity maintenance. Wf4Ever will be evaluated in two workflow-intensive use cases in the domains of Astronomomy and Genomics.