Researchers from the Ontological Engineering Group (OEG) at Spain's Universidad Politécnica de Madrid's Facultad de Informática are participating, together with other Spanish, English, Polish and Dutch experts, in the European Wf4Ever project. The project seeks to apply the social networking principle to scientific research.
Wf4Ever is a European Commission Seventh Framework Programme that began in December last year and is scheduled for completion in December 2013. It has a budget of €3.86 million.
The huge data output of many scientific disciplines nowadays calls for standardised approaches to the preservation of data, experimental methods and metadata associated with the scientific discovery process. These approaches are usually packaged in what are called scientific workflows and are seen to be the most important components of data-intensive science.
Wf4Ever develops a software architecture and reference implementation for the preservation and efficient retrieval and reuse of these scientific workflows, the results of workflow executions and the provenance of the data used.
First, the study focuses on what, within the research project, have been termed research objects. Second, Wf4Ever seeks to address the development of tools that provide support for the access, manipulation, sharing, reuse and evolution of these research objects. Finally, Wf4Ever contributes to supporting the integral management of the workflow life cycle and associated materials.
Wf4Ever is implemented on myExperiment, a commonly used scientific workflow support platform. This platform is extended with functions related to research object management and preservation, with support for collaboration and research object sharing and mechanisms for assuring workflow integrity maintenance and authenticity.
Wf4Ever will apply all these scientific and technological results in the context of two scientific domains - astronomy and genomics - characterised by a work method disposed to the use of scientific workflows.
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