Composer-science: um framework para a composição de workflows científicos

Abstract

An important concept in e-Science research is scientific workflows, which are usually long, consisting of several applications that, together, represent a scientific experiment. One possibility to assist in defining these scientific workflows is the use of tools that add semantics to the composition process. Semantic Web services have technologies that are highly favorable to their composition, in order to obtain more complex processes. Examples of these technologies are the use of Web standards, platform independence, programming language independence, possibility of distributed processing and especially the use of semantic resources that enable their discovery, automatic composition and invocation. With the aim of assisting in the discovery of Web services for scientific workflows composition, we propose the development of a framework, named Composer-Science, to conduct the search for semantic Web services and compose them, thus defining a scientific workflow. The overall objective of Composer-Science is to allow researcher to describe semantically a scientific workflow and, considering this description automatize, through the use of semantic web services and ontologies, the semantic search for services in repositories and the generation of scientific workflows from this composition. The overall objective of the framework can be broken down into specific objectives: registration and storage of domain ontologies (OWL) and semantic annotations of Web services (OWL-S), in distributed repositories (databases) of the framework; implementation of semantic search, based on requirements provided by the researcher, in distributed repositories, in order to discovery semantic Web services that match the semantic requirements provided; the syntactic analysis, based on structural requirements (input and output), and semantic analysis of services discovered using semantic search, in order to obtain their possible compositions; the generation of WS-BPEL workflow models from the possible compositions. Finally, the models generated by the framework can be used in Workflow Management Systems (WMS) and composed with other workflow models.