Zhao, Jun and Gomez-perez, Jose Manuel and Belhajjame, Khalid and Klyne, Graham and Garcia-cuesta, Esteban and Garrido, Aleix and Hettne, Kristina and Roos, Marco and De Roure, David and Goble, Carole (2012) Why workflows break : understanding and combating decay in Taverna workflows. In: E-Science (e-Science), 2012 IEEE 8th International Conference on :. IEEE, GBR, pp. 1-9. ISBN 9781467344678
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
Workflows provide a popular means for preserving scientific methods by explicitly encoding their process. However, some of them are subject to a decay in their ability to be re-executed or reproduce the same results over time, largely due to the volatility of the resources required for workflow executions. This paper provides an analysis of the root causes of workflow decay based on an empirical study of a collection of Taverna workflows from the myExperiment repository. Although our analysis was based on a specific type of workflow, the outcomes and methodology should be applicable to workflows from other systems, at least those whose executions also rely largely on accessing third-party resources. Based on our understanding about decay we recommend a minimal set of auxiliary resources to be preserved together with the workflows as an aggregation object and provide a software tool for end-users to create such aggregations and to assess their completeness.