Today, scientific workflows are gaining popularity among the scientific community because of their features like reusability, easy modifications while sharing, and so on. These workflows depend on research objects, which are based on ontologies, such as object reuse and exchange vocabulary, the annotation ontology, and the W3C PROV ontology. This paper develops tools for creating and managing workflow-centric research objects (WRO).

The authors incorporate four ontologies in their proposed models. They further develop a suite of interoperable tools, such as research object manager, for creating, annotating, publishing, and managing WRO, and a research object digital library for dealing with collaboration, versioning, evolution, and quality management of WRO. The authors add an extension to myExperiment, a popular virtual research environment, which allows end users to create, share, publish, and curate research objects.

For experiments, the authors present a case study, a workflow-based experiment investigating the epigenetic mechanisms involved in Huntington’s disease (HD). They consider epigenetic datasets from CpG islands and chromatin marks for analyzing the HD gene expression data of three different brain regions. They further present two analyses and three workflows for gene interpretation. This aids in creating WRO containing information like original hypothesis, example inputs, workflow definitions, metadata descriptions, and implementation details.

For their current project, the authors like to collaborate with other communities, such as the EU Scape project or Timbus project, the EU BioVel project, GigaScience, FigShare, and Dataverse. They further describe the potential of their work in preserving scientific workflows, reusing existing workflows, and promoting and encouraging data citation and sharing, making this paper an interesting read.