1. WORKFLOW-CENTRIC RESEARCH
OBJECTS: FIRST CLASS CITIZENS IN
SCHOLARLY DISCOURSE
Khalid Belhajjame, Oscar Corcho, Daniel Garijo, Jun Zhao, Paolo
Missier, David Newman, Raul Palma, Sean Bechhofer, Esteban Garcıa
Cuesta, José Manuel Gomez-Perez, Graham Klyne, Kevin Page, Marco
Roos, José Enrique Ruiz, Stian Soiland-Reyes, Lourdes Verdes-
Montenegro, David De Roure, Carole A. Goble
http://www.wf4ever-project.org

2. FROM ELECTRONIC PAPERS
TO RESEARCH OBJECTS
11 February 2012
Scientists
DICoSE workshop
Hypothesis
Experiments
Annotations
Research
Object
Electronic Results
paper
Provenance
2
Datasets

3. WORKFLOW: EXAMPLE
11 February 2012
 Example of a scientific
DICoSE workshop
workflow that implement
a proteomic experiment
 The analysis operations
that compose the
workflow are provided in
this case by third party
web services.
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4. BENEFITS OF RESEARCH OBJECTS
11 February 2012
 Aresearch object aggregates all elements that
are necessary to understand research
DICoSE workshop
investigations.
 Methods (experiments) are viewed as first class
citizens
 Promote reuse
 Enable the verification of reproducibility of the
results
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5. OUTLINE
11 February 2012
 Context: Research Objects as First Class Citizens
DICoSE workshop
 Workflow Research Object Model
 LifeCycle of Workflow Research Objects
 Conclusions and Future Work
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6. RESEARCH OBJECT MODEL: OVERVIEW
11 February 2012
DICoSE workshop
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7. 11 February 2012
WORKFLOW TEMPLATE AND WORKFLOW RUN
DICoSE workshop
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8. 11 February 2012 DICoSE workshop
8
EXAMPLE

9. 11 February 2012 DICoSE workshop
9
EXAMPLE (CONT.)

10. 11 February 2012 DICoSE workshop
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EXAMPLE (CONT.)

11. GROUNDING WORKFLOW-CENTRIC RESEARCH
OBJECTS USING SEMANTIC TECHNOLOGIES
11 February 2012
 Workflow-centric research objects are encoded using RDF,
according to a set of ontologies that are publicly available
 Research objects use the Object Exchange and Reuse (ORE)
model, to represent aggregation.
DICoSE workshop
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12. GROUNDING WORKFLOW-CENTRIC RESEARCH
OBJECTS USING SEMANTIC TECHNOLOGIES
11 February 2012
(CONT.)
 We use the Annotation Ontology (AO), to annotate research
object resources and their relationships.
DICoSE workshop
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13. OUTLINE
11 February 2012
 Context: Research Objects as First Class Citizens
DICoSE workshop
 Workflow Research Object Model
 LifeCycle of Workflow Research Objects
 Conclusions and Future Work
13

14. Live RO Live RO
Scientist My supervisor calls
My supervisor calls
me again and we
Reviews
received and
A new PhD
student
me to report my work decide to publish our final version continues my
RO+paper published work
<<copy>> <<copy>> <<copy, filter
and curate>>
<<copy>>
<<versionOf>>
Scientist
RO snapshot RO snapshot
<<versionOf>>
Identified by a URI Identified by a URI
Some metadata Some metadata
Some curation Some curation
Mostly private (for my Mostly private (for my group
group) and for paper reviewers)
Identified by a URI
Librarian/Curator Archived RO Good metadata
and curation
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Mostly public

15. OUTLINE
11 February 2012
 Context: Research Objects as First Class Citizens
DICoSE workshop
 Workflow Research Object Model
 LifeCycle of Workflow Research Objects
 Conclusions and Future Work
15

16. CONCLUSIONS
11 February 2012
 ResearchObjects capture information that is
necessary for understanding the results of
research investigations as well as the methods
DICoSE workshop
(workflows) used in those investigation
 Wepresented a model for specifying workflow
research objects
 Wespecified how instances of that model can be
encoded using semantic web technologies using
standards such as Object Exchange and Reuse,
and the Annotation Ontology
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17. ONGOING AND FUTURE WORK
11 February 2012
 We
are currently developing in the context of the
Wf4Ever project a family of tools for the
management of workflow research objects
DICoSE workshop
 Integration with the myExperiment Social Network
Portal
 We are also investigating issues such as:
 Decay
 Discovery and Reuse
 Scalability
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18. RESEARCH OBJECT SPECIFICATION ARE
PUBLICLY AVAILABLE
11 February 2012
Wf4Ever Research Object Specification is available
DICoSE workshop
at http://wf4ever.github.com/ro/
Wf4Ever Research Object Vocabularies and
Ontologies Primer is available at
http://wf4ever.github.com/ro-primer/
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