Service-based integration of human users in workflow-driven scientific experiments

Abstract

The use of information technology in research and practice leads to increased degree of automation of tasks and makes scientific experiments more efficient in terms of cost, speed, accuracy, and flexibility. Scientific workflows have proven useful for the automation of scientific computations. However, not all tasks of an experiment can be automated. Some decisions still need to be made by human users, for instance, how an automated system should proceed in an exceptional situation. To address the need for integration of human users in such automated systems, we propose the concept of Human Communication Flows, which specify best practices about how a scientific workflow can interact with a human user. We developed a human communication framework that implements Communication Flows in a pipes-and-filters architecture and supports both notifications and request-response interactions. Different Communication Services can be plugged into the framework to account for different communication capabilities of human users. We facilitate the use of Communication Flows within a scientific workflow by means of reusable workflow fragments implementing the interaction with the framework.