This tutorial introduces how workflows are specified in YAML files.
What is YAML?
YAML is plain text format for representing data organized as lists of values or sets of key-value pairs (mappings or dictionaries). The values in these lists and in the key-value pairs of mappings can themselves be lists or mappings. YAML is a superset of JSON (every JSON document is a valid YAML document) that uses white space (rather than braces and quotes) to organize data and is thus easy to read.
Kurator-Akka uses YAML to represent workflow definitions so that workflows can be specified and executed without using any software development tools (other than a text editor) or graphical user interfaces. And other programs can generate workflow specifications simply by producing a YAML file.
See http://yaml.org/ for more information about YAML and a list of libraries in C/C++, Ruby, Python, Java, Perl, C#, and other languages for composing and parsing YAML.
Example workflow