Automatic Generation of Functional Workflows Using a Semantic Specification

Workflows are becoming an increasingly more common paradigm to manage and control scientific applications. They are an effective technology to define composition of different pieces of knowledge, both in the application domain and in the scientific context. However, workflows are addressed in a number of different perspectives and little consensus has been reached yet on the specification, languages, modelling and systems to adopt in advanced contexts like Grids or semantic web. In this paper, we describe a tool for supporting users in specifying their functional workflows using a top level description, close to the application domain, and further authoring workflows running on Grids. Our tool is the semantic component of a workflow management platform targeted at scientific applications and is able to automatically generate BPEL processes based on the information extracted from a given ontology. The component has been successfully tested on image processing workflows, using Active BPEL engine as a deployment environment and OWL for ontology design. The functionality provided by the semantic component has been made available through a web interface.