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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20260614T175004Z
UID:1c27b7cd-6192-44ca-8f77-942b8db2eb15
DTSTART:20200309T090000Z
DTEND:20200313T170000Z
DESCRIPTION:In the age of computational science\, researchers in the life s
 ciences – just as in other domains – regularly face the need of compos
 ing several individual software tools into pipelines or workflows that per
 form the specific data analysis processes that they need in their research
 . For over 20 years now\, dedicated scientific workflow management systems
  have been supporting scientists in this task\, and they continue to gain 
 popularity. In fact\, recent years have seen significant progress in the f
 unctional annotation of bioinformatics software tools\, as well as their v
 irtualization\, containerization and assembly into workflows for automatic
 ally executing the processes.\n\nAt least since the rise of the Semantic W
 eb in the early 2000s\, also the idea of semantics-based automated composi
 tion of workflows has been around to simplify the work with scientific wor
 kflows further and free life science researchers from having to deal with 
 the technicalities of software composition. This would not only save valua
 ble research time\, but also reduce errors\, allow benchmarking of data an
 alysis pipelines and enable new scientific findings by discovering workflo
 ws that researchers would not have thought of themselves. However\, despit
 e its obvious potential and appeal\, the need for optimizing data analysis
  workflows\, and despite different research groups working on the topic\, 
 automated workflow composition has not yet arrived in the daily practice o
 f life science researchers.\n\nThe reasons for this are manifold. Some are
  more practical (for example the lack of automatic composition tools in th
 e commonly used software frameworks)\, others are of more fundamental natu
 re (such as questions on specification languages\, composition algorithms\
 , formal semantics and workflows representations). On one important aspect
 \, namely the semantic annotation of tools on a large scale\, the life sci
 ence community has made significant progress in the last years: The EDAM o
 ntology provides a controlled vocabulary of bioinformatics operations\, da
 ta types and formats\, and the bio.tools registry has become a large colle
 ction of bioinformatics tools that are semantically annotated with terms f
 rom the EDAM ontology. As demonstrated in a recent Bioinformatics publicat
 ion (https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/35/4/656/5060940)\, t
 his forms a solid basis for performing automated workflow composition in t
 he life sciences domain. Nevertheless\, it is still a long way to its use 
 in daily scientific practice.\n\nThis workshop will bring together researc
 hers and practitioners who have been working on different aspects related 
 to automated workflow composition in the life sciences. These include life
  science researchers\, tool providers\, infrastructure developers\, ontolo
 gists\, algorithmics researchers and many more. They do not normally come 
 together as a group at the regular scientific events\, so a Lorentz worksh
 op devoted to this topic provides a unique opportunity to join forces and 
 together significantly advance the field. 
LOCATION:Lorentz Center Oort
SUMMARY:Automated Workflow Composition in the Life Sciences 
URL;VALUE=URI:https://www.lorentzcenter.nl/lc/web/2020/1201/info.php3?wsid=
 1201&venue=Oort
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