An intelligent assistant for interactive workflow composition

Complex applications in many areas, including scientific computations and business-related web services, are created from collections of components to form workflows. In many cases end users have requirements and preferences that depend on how the workflow unfolds, and that cannot be specified beforehand. Workflow editors enable users to formulate workflows, but the editors need to be augmented with intelligent assistance in order to help users in several key aspects of the task, namely: 1) keeping track of detailed constraints across the components selected and their connections; 2) specifying the workflow flexibly, e.g., topdown, bottom-up, from requirements, or from available data; and 3) taking partial or incomplete descriptions of workflows and understanding the steps needed for their completion. We present an approach that combines knowledge bases (that have rich representations of components) together with planning techniques (that can track the relations and constraints among ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: IUI
• Authors: Jihie Kim, Marc Spraragen, Yolanda Gil
• Keywords: Cases End Users, Editors Enable Users, IUI 2004, Software Engineering, Workflows