Workflow Discovery: the Problem, a Case Study from E-Science and a Graph-Based Solution

Much has been written on the promise of Web service discovery and (semi-) automated composition. In this discussion, the value to practitioners of discovering and reusing existing service compositions, captured in workflows, is mostly ignored. This paper presents one solution to workflow discovery. Through a survey with 21 scientists and developers from the myGrid workflow environment, workflow discovery requirements are elicited. Through a user experiment with 13 scientists, an attempt is made to build a gold standard for workflow ranking. Through the design and implementation of a workflow discovery tool, a mechanism for ranking workflow fragments is provided based on graph sub-isomorphism matching. The tool evaluation, drawing on a corpus of 89 public workflows from bioinformatics and the results of the user experiment, finds that the average human ranking can largely be reproduced