Making Data and Workflows Findable for Machines

Abstract

Research data currently face a huge increase of data objects with an increasing variety of types (data types, formats) and variety of workflows by which objects need to be managed across their lifecycle by data infrastructures. Researchers desire to shorten the workflows from data generation to analysis and publication, and the full workflow needs to become transparent to multiple stakeholders, including research administrators and funders. This poses challenges for research infrastructures and user-oriented data services in terms of not only making data and workflows findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable, but also doing so in a way that leverages machine support for better efficiency. One primary need to be addressed is that of findability, and achieving better findability has benefits for other aspects of data and workflow management. In this article, we describe how machine capabilities can be extended to make workflows more findable, in particular by leveraging the Digital Object Architecture, common object operations and machine learning techniques.