Beyond Scientific Workflows: Networked Open Processes

Abstract

The multitude of scientific services and processes being developed brings about challenges for future in silico distributed experiments. Choosing the correct service from an expanding body of processes means that the the task of manually building workflows is becoming untenable. In this paper we propose a framework to tackle the future of scientific collaborative distributed computing. We introduce the notion of Networked Open Processes whereby processes are exposed, published, and linked using semantics in the same way as is done with Linked Open Data. As part of the framework we introduce several novel concepts including Process Object Identifiers, Semantic Function Templates, and TReQL, a SQL-like language for querying networked open process graphs.