Principles for Interactive Acquisition and Validation of Workflows

Workflows, also known as process models, are essential in many science and engineering fields. Workflows express compositions of individual steps or tasks that assembled together account for various aspects of an overall process. When workflows include dozens of components and many links among them, the creation of valid workflows becomes challenging since users have to track many interdependencies and constraints. This paper describes principles for assisting users to create valid workflows that are based on two knowledge acquisition systems that the authors have developed. A shared goal in these projects was to enable end users who do not have computer science backgrounds, such as biologists, military officers, or engineers, to create valid end-to-end process models or workflows.