Exp-WF: Workflow Support for Laboratory
Information Systems
B. Gabor, B. Kemme
Abstract:
As scientific experiments and their analysis become increasingly
automated, the need for workflow management support rises. Many
workflow management systems tailored to scientific workflows have been
developed. However, they are mainly stand-alone systems and ignore that
many scientific research groups already store and manage experimental
data in laboratory information systems, called LIMS. LIMS are typically
web-based and allow researchers to insert and view experiment related
data. In this paper we describe Exp-WF, a workflow management module
that is designed to be incorporated into a typical LIMS such that
workflow management and the traditional functionality of a LIMS
co-exist. Scientists describe the execution order of experiments as a
workflow model. Exp-WF then automatically selects experiments for
execution and dispatches them to the people or machines responsible for
performing them. ExpWF extends existing workflow models to be able to
handle the particularities of scientific experiment workflows. ExpWF
can be incorporated into an existing web-based LIMS in a nonintrusive
way by using servlet filter technology to observe user actions and act
upon them. Exp-WF uses agentbased technology with asynchronous
communication to dispatch tasks to remote machines.
IEEE Workshop on Workflow
and Data Flow for Scientific Applications (SciFlow'06), co-located with
Int. Conf. on Data Engineering, Atlanta, Georgia, April 2006.
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