On-going efforts to improve seamless building of scientific workflows in the Astronomy domain have already produced the first ready-to-install AstroTaverna plugins.  Among the most important features are:

• Access to Virtual Observatory Registry
• Access to ConeSearch, SIA and SSA VO Services
• Efficient visualization of VOTables data and description
• VOTable data extraction and filtering

Upcoming versions will cover SAMP connectivity to other astronomical software, access to CDS SOAP Services, access to STIL Library and STILTS Tools via local services, as well as other local services allowing files format conversion and standard astronomical functions. Moreover, because astronomers are found to be heavy users of Python scripting language, some exploration studies are considering to provide Taverna users the possibility to add their own Jython beanshells when building Taverna workflows. 

The work undertaken in the frame of the Wf4Ever project will foster the development of astronomical workflows, favoring the use of Virtual Observatory standards for interoperability among astronomical data and process.

There exists different types of provenance which are being treated at WF4Ever project. Among all of them the provenance of workflow results records the actions which occurs at the execution of a workflow. This collected information can include inputs, intermediate results, outputs, and their execution timestamp (see definition). This information is specially relevant due to it allows the evaluation of some desirable characteristics of a RO (for example repeatibility or reproducibility).

Currently some initial data related with provenance of workflow results have been generated from different sourcing platforms(Taverna and WINGS) in order to provide a few examples which are compliant with the wfprov ontology developed at Wf4Ever as part of the RO ontology. Furthermore, the PROV-O ontology has been also used as a bridge between source ontologies and the final wfprov ontology improving its generalization capabilities of the process. These imported examples are also part of the testbed which is being currently use for validation purposes of the different funcionalities of the project. 

This provenance data has been made available for testing purposes at a SPARQL endpoint and some examples queries have been created to get some of that provenance information in order to allow users feedback and for its use as part of the integrity and authenticity RO funcionalities.

Kostas Karasavvas has won the 'Application Showcase Award' at NBIC 2012*. This application makes it possible to run any (public) workfow on myExperiment directly as a Web Application without any further dependencies. It enables workflow developers to share their work with workflow-ignorant collaborators, without any need to develop some kind of user interface.

According to award committee chair and NBIC CTO Rob Hooft the prize was awarded for 'providing a real service that many people have been waiting for'. Its general high quality was appreciated and that Kostas prioritizes usefulness and stability over novelty.  The award committee added that the prize is meant as an incentive for the finishing touches, such as further integratation with myExperiment.

Kostas and collaborators previously enabled the use of Taverna workflows in the server-based tool 'Galaxy', that is highly popular among genomics researchers. With the same amount of complexity as for any other tool in Galaxy, myExperiment users can include a workflow as a tool in Galaxy.

Kostas' work is the result of a NBIC-myGrid-myExperiment collaboration in the context of NBIC's BioAssist program. The project is supervised by wf4ever user Marco Roos, and driven by users associated with BioAssist and workflow designers at the Human Genetics Department of wf4ever partner LUMC**. The Application Showcase used biological workflows that also feature in wf4ever as examples.

* Netherlands Bioinformatics Centre
** Leiden University Medical Centre.

Two Wf4ever papers have been accepted at the biannual IPAW workshop, which will take place in Santa Barbara, California during the week of 18-22 June 2012.

- Khalid Belhajjame, Paolo Missier, and Carole A. Goble. Detecting Duplicate Records in Scientific Workflow Results.

- Paolo Missier and Khalid Belhajjame. A PROV encoding for provenance analysis using deductive rules.

The first paper presents a new algorithm for detecting duplicates in workflow results by exploiting their provenance, whereas the second paper describes an implementation of the W3C provenance data model PROV using the DLV Datalog engine.