Workflow analysis using graph kernels

Workflow enacting systems are a popular technology in business and e-science alike to flexibly define and enact complex data processing tasks. Since the construction of a workflow for a specific task can become quite complex, efforts are currently underway to increase the re-use of workflows through the implementation of specialized workflow repositories. While existing methods to exploit the knowledge in these repositories usually consider workflows as an atomic entity, our work is based on the fact that workflows can naturally be viewed as graphs. Hence, in this paper we investigate the use of graph kernels for the problems of workflow discovery, workflow recommendation, and workflow pattern extraction, paying special attention on the typical situation of few labeled and many unlabeled workflows. To empirically demonstrate the feasibility of our approach we investigate a dataset of bioinformatics workflows retrieved from the website myexperiment.org.