A Domain-Specific Composition Environment for Provenance Query of Scientific Workflows

Scientific Workflow Management Systems (SWfMS) systematically capture and store diverse provenance information at various phases. Scientists compose multitude of queries on this information. The support of integrated query composition and visualization in existing SWfMS is limited. Most systems do not support any custom query composition. VisTrails and Taverna introduced custom query languages vtPQL and TriQL to support limited workflow monitoring. Galaxy only tracks histories of operations and displays in lists. No SWfMS supports a scientist-friendly user interface for provenance query composition and visualization. In this paper, we propose a domain-specific composition environment for provenance query of scientific workflows. As a proof of concept, we developed a provenance system for bioinformatics workflow management system and evaluated it in multiple dimensions, one for measuring the subjective perception of participants on the usability of it using NASA-TLX and SUS survey instruments and the other for measuring the flexibility through plugin integration using NASA-TLX.