Using Ontologies to Support Deep Water Oil Exploration Scientific Workflows

Scientific experiments generate a large amount of data to be processed and analyzed. As the amount of data increases, the way engineers define their own experiments, analyze the output and share them is becoming complex to manage. scientific workflow management systems (WfMS) are being used to orchestrate a sequence of programs, services and resources, defined by scientific workflows. However, current WfMS are focused on the workflow execution and present limitations on the semantic support to design the experiment. These tools lack on semantic descriptions of available resources to design scientific workflow. This paper presents an ontology for deep water oil exploration workflow. This ontology has been used to present some semantic concepts to help defining a workflow to be further executed by a WfMS. We evaluate this semantic support on a real workflow that calculates fatigue on risers in deep water oil platforms. The results reinforce the benefits of semantic support over program chaining in manual workflow design.