Using Workflow Medleys to Streamline Exploratory Tasks

To analyze and understand the growing wealth of scientific data, complex workflows need to be assembled, often requiring the combination of looselycoupled resources, specialized libraries, distributed computing infrastructure, and Web services. However, constructing these workflows is a non-trivial task, especially for users who do not have programming expertise. This problem is compounded for exploratory tasks, where the workflows need to be iteratively refined. In this paper, we introduce workflow medleys, a new approach for manipulating collections of workflows. We propose a workflow manipulation language that includes operations that are common in exploratory tasks and present a visual interface designed for this language. We briefly discuss how medleys have been applied in two (real) applications.