Curating Scientific Web Services and Workflows

Abstract

A bewildering array of digital resources is available to the modern researcher, ranging from libraries of articles and data collections to analytical tools and visualization applications, many publicly available.Take bioinformatics, for example.Nucleic Acids Research describes more than 1,000 databases 1 drawn from a "Bioinformatics Nation" 2 of different subdisciplines, research teams, and institutes.The same is true for chemistry, astronomy, earth sciences, and just about any information-rich scientific area.These digital resources are combined and their data aggregated and analyzed in the day-to-day work of skilled scientific investigators.But even though we are familiar with the need to curate our data for dissemination and for the long term, we must not neglect the curation and cataloguing of the processes that we use to search, integrate, and analyze that data.Where researchers may once have used applications or software libraries, increasingly we see functionality provided instead through web-based resources.In nanotechnology, for example, nanoHUB (http://www.nanohub.org)provides more than 1,000 resources for research, education, and collaboration-including simulation tools accessed from the web browser.Hence the web has become a distributed computing platform supporting research on an everyday basis.In this article we will highlight two specific kinds of processes-web services and workflows-that are enjoying increasing adoption.They have already become prevalent in the in silico research of life scientists, providing a revealing glimpse into the future.Web services offer a well-defined programming interface that software applications, written in various programming languages and running on various platforms, can use to process data over the Internet.An increasing number of resources are available via web services interfaces, turning these resources into services that can be combined into complex networked applications.In the life sciences, open source and commercial integration systems, data warehouses, and integration frameworks use web services behind the scenes.Workflows are an alternative to using precooked applications, with embedded data pipelines and analysis scripts.Scientific workflow management

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