Search and result presentation in scientific workflow repositories

We study the problem of searching a repository of complex hierarchical workflows whose component modules, both composite and atomic, have been annotated with keywords. Since keyword search does not use the graph structure of a workflow, we develop a model of workflows using context- free bag grammars. We then give efficient polynomial-time algorithms that, given a workflow and a keyword query, de- termine whether some execution of the workflow matches the query. Based on these algorithms we develop a search and ranking solution that efficiently retrieves the top-k gram- mars from a repository. Finally, we propose a novel result presentation method for grammars matching a keyword query, based on representative parse-trees. The effectiveness of our approach is validated through an extensive experimental evaluation.