About Workflows

The idea of a workflow process can be easily grasped with the metaphor of climbing Mount Everest. A base camp and a succession of fixed  intermediate camps and other steps have been clearly established over years to climb the mountain. Nowadays this route is followed by thousands of climbers. With adaptation, this approach is also followed to climb other high summits of the planet. Similarly, BioVeL offers fixed sequences of processing steps to analyse given types of biodiversity data. We call these sequences ‘workflows’ and the processing steps of which they are composed, ‘services’. The strength of a workflow particularly proves itself when complex sequences of operations need to be repeated over large amounts of data. The construction of workflows is based on a capitalization of transferable knowledge, and each one can contribute to the development of others. Workflows are very efficient and appropriate to process large amounts of data and can be made available for re-use and/or adaptation to other data sets.

Workflows are used in many areas which typically involve mundane tasks such as getting a travel order and processing invoices. Although the idea remains the same, introducing worflows to scientific research and to support creative/exploratory work for accessing distributed computing resources has a slightly different focus. It has earlier been achieved in bioinformatics and a few other scientific areas. BioVeL is now applying it to biodiversity science.

Example of creating a workflow:

Study on the ecological niche of the south-east Asian horseshoe crab, (Carcinoscorpius rotundicauda), an endangered species:
• Import south east Asian data from external library
• Apply succession of processing steps (made up of “services 1, 2, to X”), = “workflow”
• Result: ecological niche map

Showcase study 1: create a workflow*

Study on the ecological niche of the south east Asian horseshoe crab, an endangered species:
• Import south east Asian data from external library
• Apply succession of “services” = workflow
• Result: ecological niche map

Showcase study 2: re-use a workflow

Study on the ecological niche of the American horseshoe crab
• Import American data
• Re-use south east Asia crab study workflow
• Result: ecological niche map for American horseshoe crab
Compare the ecological niches of the south east Asian and American crabs.

Potential study of the ecological niche of an African animal
• Import African data
• Re-use horseshoe crab study workflow
• Result: ecological niche map for African animal

*Maps and horseshoe crab photo: courtesy Matthias Obst, University of Gothenburg, Sweden