Cyberintegrator Overview
Cyberintegrator (CI) is an application that lets users create a workflow by defining a series of step-by-step actions as users explore data and tools. CI is different from other workflow systems because it allows people to work in a natural way and provides a macro-recording approach to defining workflows. Other workflow systems require the user to define a workflow series and then execute it to determine a result; where CI lets the user define simple steps that identify a data source, a tool and view the result (data source > tool > result) and the workflow editor records the actions via macro-recording capability. This approach provides users a simple way to explore data and tools while CI records the user’s step-by-step actions to create an end-to-end workflow with detailed provenance of the data, tools and actions.
Figure 1: The Cyberintegrator Desktop Application
All actions, sources, processes and results described in Cyberintegrator are stored in RDF (Resource Description Framework) which provides a simple yet powerful scheme, “Subject > Predicate > Object”, to describe relationships between data and makes all descriptions portable.
Cyberintegrator provides a user friendly environment that:
- enables users to easily integrate heterogeneous tools and data sets in a unified environment,
- provides data annotation, user defined tools and workflows with metadata,
- enables immediate visualization of data and metadata,
- shares data, tools and workflows through local and remote context repositories,
- executes step-by-step workflows locally or remotely during scientific explorations,
- and gathers provenance information about tool executions and data creations.
Cyberintegrator is a highly interactive environment that supports and addresses the various needs of a scientific process. It was created at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with the goal to simplify the creation of complex workflows to support scientific discoveries and provide a mechanism to conduct research more efficiently.
Cyberintegrator is built on top of the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) which supports re-configurable user interfaces and a plug-and-play architecture that makes it extensible and easy to deploy.