A Service-Oriented Framework for Executing Data Mining Workflows on Grids

Workflow environments are widely used in data mining systems to manage data and execution flows associated to complex applications. Weka, one of the most used open-source data mining systems, includes the KnowledgeFlow environment which provides a drag-and-drop interface to compose and execute data mining workflows. The Weka KnowledgeFlow allows users to execute a whole workflow only on a single computer. On the other hand, most data mining workflows include several independent branches that could be run in parallel on a set of distributed machines to reduce the overall execution time. We implemented distributed workflow execution in Weka4WS, a framework that extends Weka and its KnowledgeFlow environment to exploit distributed resources available in a Grid using Web Service technologies. In this paper we describe the Weka4WS architecture and the functionalities provided by its service-oriented KnowledgeFlow component, showing its use to compose and execute simple parallel data mining workflows. Furthermore, we present ongoing work aimed at supporting also data-parallel workflows on a Grid.