PNNL

Abstract

Domain-agnostic signature discovery entails investigation across multiple scientific disciplines. The breadth and cross-disciplinary nature of this work requires that existing executables be integrated with new capabilities into workflows, representing a wide range of user tasks. An algorithm may be written in multiple programming languages for various hardware platforms, and so workflow composition requires integrating executables from any number of remote hosts. This raises an engineering issue on how to generate web service wrappers for these heterogeneous executables and to compose them into a scientific workflow environment (e.g., Taverna). In this paper, we introduce two simple Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) to automate these processes. Our Service Description Language (SDL) describes key elements of a signature discovery service and automatically generates its implementation code. The Workflow Description Language (WDL) describes the pipeline of services and generates deployable artifacts for the Taverna workflow management system. We demonstrate our approach with a real-world workflow composed of services wrapping remote executables.