Taverna Workflows: Syntax and Semantics

This paper presents the formal syntax and the opera-tional semantics of Taverna, a workflow management sys-tem with a large user base among the e-Science commu-nity. Such formal foundation, which has so far been lack-ing, opens the way to the translation between Taverna work-flows and other process models. In particular, the ability to automatically compile a simple domain-specific process de-scription into Taverna facilitates its adoption by e-scientists who are not expert workflow developers. We demonstrate this potential through a practical use case.