Workflows for information integration in the life sciences

The increasingly computationally- and data-intensive nature of experimental science motivates recent interest in workflows, as a way to specify complex data processing and integration pipelines in a fairly intuitive way. Such workflows orchestrate the invocation of data retrieval services in a way that resembles, to some extent, Search Computing query plans. While the former are manually specified, however, the latter are the result of an automated translation process. Using lessons learnt from experience in workflow design, in this chapter we discuss some of the requirements on service curation that make automated, on-demand data integration processes possible and realistic.