The SHIWA (SHaring Interoperable Workflows for large-scale scientific simulations on Available DCIs) project enables publicly available workflows to be used by different research communities working on different workflow systems, and to be run on multiple distributed computing infrastructures. SHIWA and Wf4Ever are complementary projects: Wf4Ever takes a holistic view of the lifecycle of the workflow object while SHIWA brings very significant functionality in workflow execution. We are pleased to announce co-operation between these projects, and members of the Wf4Ever team will be attending the e-Science Workflows event held jointly with EGI in Budapest in February 2012.  A Memorandum of Understanding is under development.

Link for Shiwa https://www.shiwa-workflow.eu/about

Members of the Wf4ever team, namely Khalid Belhajjame, Jose Manual-Jomez and Jun Zhao, are co-organizing the 3rd international workshop on the Role of Semantic Web in Provenance Management. The SWPM'12 will be co-located with the ESWC conference in May 2012. It follows on from two successful editions, co-located with the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC). The SWPM workshop has the following complementary objectives:
(1) to explore the opportunities offered by the Semantic Web technologies in the context of the management and exploitation of provenance.
(2) to explore the role of provenance in real-world Semantic Web applications.
Additionally, we will organize in this edition a panel on PROV-DM, the provenance model that is currently being developed by the W3C provenance working group and which is on the W3C recommendation track. The aim is to discuss and to identify the opportunities PROV-DM presents in leveraging semantic web applications.

For further information visit the workshop website at:

http://sites.google.com/site/swpm2012/

or contact the organizers at : swpm2012 (at) googlegroups (dot) com

The Wf4Ever Architecture Task Force is designing and developing the Wf4Ever software architecture for the design and implementation of scientific workflow preservation systems, together with a reference implementation instantiating the architecture and enabling the preservation and efficient retrieval of scientific workflows across a range of domains. We are pleased to announce the publication of our design principles together with the preliminary architecture and early reference implementation. The architecture sets out to be compliant with standards like the OAIS reference model and the Linked Data initiative, to combine workflow lifecycle management, social networks and digital libraries, and to extend them with contributions from component-level research. Following a codesign methodology, we are building on an existing system, the myExperiment repository, to develop preservation capabilities that consider the complexity of scientific workflows and their related objects. Our ambition is that the design, software, services and methodologies established in the project will be applicable to other systems also. The Architecture is described in Wf4Ever Architecture - Phase I link to D1.3v1

 WF4Ever partners are working on how to use the provenance traces (among other data types)  to support the measurement of integrity and authenticity of  scientific research objects (RO).  The provenance of a resource is defined as: ''a record that describes entities and processes involved in producing and delivering or otherwise influencing that resource'' (see deliverable D4.1).This type of information is going to allow the evaluation of some Information Quality (IQ) criteria which later on will be used for the definition of a RO properties (R's) which have been settled for the Integrity and Authenticity measurement. 

A first prototype (screenshots)is being developed based on the open provenance model OPM and evaluating the Stability IQ dimension (see also matrixIQ-R's ) Stability is defined as the degree that a RO maintains its original characteristics throughout the time in order to be able to accomplish with its specific goals. The IQ dimension captures the trace of actions which have been done by a user over a RO and evaluates its decay degree.  At present, an algorithm based on a-priori expert knowledge is being used and is expected to be improved using end-users validation (astronomy and bioinformatics domains). In near future this process will also be adapted to the wfdesc defined as the provenance model for the WF4Ever project (wfdesc ontology) .