Abstract

Scientists increasingly use workflows to represent and share their computational experiments. Because of their declarative nature, focus on pre-existing component composition and the availability of visual editors, workflows are often seen as more “natural” than programming or scripting languages for representing data analysis procedures. However, there is still a significant gap between the naturalness of workflow representations and natural language. In this paper, we aim to identify key constructs that intelligent workflow systems could support to allow for more natural workflow representations. These constructs are identified through a comparison of bioinformatics workflows and their associated descriptions obtained from the virtual research environment myExperiment.

Date

March 14, 2026

Authors

Paul Groth, Yolanda Gil

Journal

Proceedings of the IEEE Third International Workshop on Scientific Workflows