HyWare: a HYbrid Workflow lAnguage for Research E-infrastructures

Research e-infrastructures are "systems of systems", patchworks of tools, services and data sources, evolving over time to address the needs of the scientific process. Accordingly, in such environments, researchers implement their scientific processes by means of workflows made of a variety of actions, including for example usage of web services, download and execution of shared software libraries or tools, or local and manual manipulation of data. Although scientists may benefit from sharing their scientific process, the heterogeneity underpinning e-infrastructures hinders their ability to represent, share and eventually reproduce such workflows. This work presents HyWare, a language for representing scientific process in highly-heterogeneous e-infrastructures in terms of so-called hybrid workflows. HyWare lays in between "business process modeling languages", which offer a formal and high-level description of a reasoning, protocol, or procedure, and "workflow execution languages", which enable the fully automated execution of a sequence of computational steps via dedicated engines.