Domain-specific languages for composing signature discovery workflows
Date:
Domain-agnostic signature discovery involves research that spans multiple scientific disciplines. The cross-disciplinary scope and complexity of this work require that existing executable applications be integrated with new capabilities into unified workflows representing diverse user tasks.
In practice, an algorithm may be implemented in multiple programming languages for different hardware platforms, which creates a significant engineering challenge: how to generate web service wrappers for these heterogeneous executables and compose them into a scientific workflow environment such as Taverna. This talk summarizes our work on two simple Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) designed to automate these processes:
Service Description Language (SDL): Defines key elements of a signature discovery service and automatically generates its implementation code.
Workflow Description Language (WDL): Describes the pipeline of services and produces deployable artifacts for the Taverna workflow management system.
We demonstrate our approach with a real-world workflow composed of services wrapping remote executables, highlighting the effectiveness of using DSLs for workflow automation in multidisciplinary scientific computing.