An intelligent assistant for interactive workflow composition

Jihie Kim, Marc Spraragen, Yolanda Gil

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

76 Scopus citations

Abstract

Complex applications in many areas, including scientific computations and business-related web services, are created from collections of components to form workflows. In many cases end users have requirements and preferences that depend on how the workflow unfolds, and that cannot be specified beforehand. Workflow editors enable users to formulate workflows, but the editors need to be augmented with intelligent assistance in order to help users in several key aspects of the task, namely: 1) keeping track of detailed constraints across the components selected and their connections; 2) specifying the workflow flexibly, e.g., top-down, bottom-up, from requirements, or from available data; and 3) taking partial or incomplete descriptions of workflows and understanding the steps needed for their completion. We present an approach that combines knowledge bases (that have rich representations of components) together with planning techniques (that can track the relations and constraints among individual steps). We illustrate the approach with an implemented system called CAT (Composition Analysis Tool) that analyzes workflows and generates error messages and suggestions in order to help users compose complete and consistent workflows.

Original languageEnglish
Pages125-131
Number of pages7
DOIs
StatePublished - 2004
EventIUI 04: 2004 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces - Madeira, Portugal
Duration: 13 Jan 200416 Jan 2004

Conference

ConferenceIUI 04: 2004 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces
Country/TerritoryPortugal
CityMadeira
Period13/01/0416/01/04

Keywords

  • Interactive planning
  • Knowledge acquisition
  • Web service composition
  • Workflow composition
  • Workflow editors

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