myTea: Connecting the Web to Digital Science on the Desktop

Bioinformaticians regularly access the hundreds of databases and tools that are available to them on the Web. None of these tools communicate with each other, causing the scientist to copy results manually from a Web site into a spreadsheet or word processor. myGrids' Taverna has made it possible to create templates (workflows) that automatically run searches using these databases and tools, cutting down what previously took days of work into hours, and enabling the automated capture of experimental details. What is still missing in the capture process, however, is the details of work done on that material once it moves from the Web to the desktop: if a scientist runs a process on some data, there is nothing to record why that action was taken; it is likewise not easy to publish a record of this process back to the community on the Web. In this paper, we present a novel interaction framework, built on Semantic Web technologies, and grounded in usability design practice, in particular the Making Tea method. Through this work, we introduce a new model of practice designed specifically to (1) support the scientists' interactions with data from the Web to the desktop, (2) provide automatic annotation of process to capture what has previously been lost and (3) associate provenance services automatically with that data in order to enable meaningful interrogation of the process and controlled sharing of the results

Transparent Orchestration of Task-based Parallel Applications in Containers Platforms

This paper presents a framework to easily build and execute parallel applications in container-based distributed computing platforms in a user-transparent way. The proposed framework is a combination of the COMP Superscalar (COMPSs) programming model and runtime, which provides a straightforward way to develop task-based parallel applications from sequential codes, and containers management platforms that ease the deployment of applications in computing environments (as Docker, Mesos or Singularity). This framework provides scientists and developers with an easy way to implement parallel distributed applications and deploy them in a one-click fashion. We have built a prototype which integrates COMPSs with different containers engines in different scenarios: i) a Docker cluster, ii) a Mesos cluster, and iii) Singularity in an HPC cluster. We have evaluated the overhead in the building phase, deployment and execution of two benchmark applications compared to a Cloud testbed based on KVM and OpenStack and to the usage of bare metal nodes. We have observed an important gain in comparison to cloud environments during the building and deployment phases. This enables better adaptation of resources with respect to the computational load. In contrast, we detected an extra overhead during the execution, which is mainly due to the multi-host Docker networking.This work is partly supported by the Spanish Government through Programa Severo Ochoa (SEV-2015-0493), by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology through TIN2015-65316 project, by the Generalitat de Catalunya under contracts 2014-SGR-1051 and 2014-SGR-1272, and by the European Union through the Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant 690116 (EUBra-BIGSEA Project). Results presented in this paper were obtained using the Chameleon testbed supported by the National Science Foundation.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

e-Social Science and Evidence-Based Policy Assessment : Challenges and Solutions

Peer reviewedPreprin

An Open Framework for Extensible Multi-Stage Bioinformatics Software

In research labs, there is often a need to customise software at every step in a given bioinformatics workflow, but traditionally it has been difficult to obtain both a high degree of customisability and good performance. Performance-sensitive tools are often highly monolithic, which can make research difficult. We present a novel set of software development principles and a bioinformatics framework, Friedrich, which is currently in early development. Friedrich applications support both early stage experimentation and late stage batch processing, since they simultaneously allow for good performance and a high degree of flexibility and customisability. These benefits are obtained in large part by basing Friedrich on the multiparadigm programming language Scala. We present a case study in the form of a basic genome assembler and its extension with new functionality. Our architecture has the potential to greatly increase the overall productivity of software developers and researchers in bioinformatics.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figure, to appear in proceedings of PRIB 201

Integrating Blockchain for Data Sharing and Collaboration Support in Scientific Ecosystem Platform

Nowadays, scientific experiments are conducted in a collaborative way. In collaborative scientific experiments, aspects such interoperability, privacy and trust in shared data should be considered to allow the reproducibility of the results. A critical aspect associated with a scientific process is its provenance information, which can be defined as the origin or lineage of the data that helps to understand the results of the scientific experiment. Other concern when conducting collaborative experiments, is the confidentiality, considering that only properly authorized personnel can share or view results. In this paper, we propose BlockFlow, a blockchain-based architecture with the aim of bringing reliability to the collaborative research, considering the capture, storage and analysis of provenance data related to a scientific ecosystem platform (E-SECO)

THE RISE OF AI IN CONTENT MANAGEMENT: REIMAGINING INTELLIGENT WORKFLOWS

As content management systems (CMS) become indispensable for managing digital experiences, AI integration promises to bring new levels of automation and intelligence to streamline workflows. This paper surveys how AI techniques like machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and knowledge graphs are transforming CMS capabilities across the content lifecycle. We analyze key use cases like automated metadata tagging, natural language generation, smart recommendations, predictive search, personalized experiences, and conversational interfaces. The benefits include enhanced content discoverability, accelerated creation, improved optimization, simplified governance, and amplified team productivity. However, adoption remains low due to challenges like opaque AI, poor workflow integration, unrealistic expectations, bias risks, and skills gaps. Strategic priorities include starting with focused pilots, evaluating multiple AI approaches, emphasizing transparent and fair AI models, and upskilling teams. Benefits are maximized through hybrid human-AI collaboration vs full automation. While AI integration is maturing, the outlook is cautiously optimistic. Leading CMS platforms are accelerating development of no-code AI tools. But mainstream adoption may take 2-5 years as skills and best practices evolve around transparent and ethical AI. Wise data practices, change management, and participatory design will be key. If implemented thoughtfully, AI can reimagine workflows by expanding human creativity, not replacing it. The future points to creative synergies between empowered users and AI assistants. But pragmatic pilots, continuous improvement, and participatory strategies are necessary to navigate the hype and deliver value. The promise warrants measured experimentation

Workflow scheduling for service oriented cloud computing

Service Orientation (SO) and grid computing are two computing paradigms that when put together using Internet technologies promise to provide a scalable yet flexible computing platform for a diverse set of distributed computing applications. This practice gives rise to the notion of a computing cloud that addresses some previous limitations of interoperability, resource sharing and utilization within distributed computing. In such a Service Oriented Computing Cloud (SOCC), applications are formed by composing a set of services together. In addition, hierarchical service layers are also possible where general purpose services at lower layers are composed to deliver more domain specific services at the higher layer. In general an SOCC is a horizontally scalable computing platform that offers its resources as services in a standardized fashion. Workflow based applications are a suitable target for SOCC where workflow tasks are executed via service calls within the cloud. One or more workflows can be deployed over an SOCC and their execution requires scheduling of services to workflow tasks as the task become ready following their interdependencies. In this thesis heuristics based scheduling policies are evaluated for scheduling workflows over a collection of services offered by the SOCC. Various execution scenarios and workflow characteristics are considered to understand the implication of the heuristic based workflow scheduling