VINCA4Science: A Personal Workflow System for e-Science

The uncertain and diversified nature of scientific research often prohibits scientists from pre-defining a common full-fledged workflow. It would help if end users are allowed to individually construct and execute personal workflows on the basis of a common skeleton. In such a personal workflow, scientists can do experiments in a "trail-and-error" manner, and keep provenance information for future analysis and reuse. Driven by these wishes, we proposed an approach to personal workflow and developed a supporting system called VINCA4Science. A synthesized view of local and networked resources is conceptualized, and a knowledge- based service recommendation mechanism is realized for guiding workflow construction. Tryout applications in bioinformatics research show that VINCA4Science helps to improve programming efficiency and quality, provide flexible management control, and therefore improve scientific productivity.