Cyberintegrator (CI) is a workflow application that lets users create a series of step-by-step actions by exploring 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 a workflow. 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 to to identify a data source, a tool and review the result (data source > tool > result). This approach provides the user a simple way to explore their data and tools while CI records the user's step-by-step actions to create an overall workflow of steps with a detailed provenance of the data and actions.
All of the operations performed in Cyberintegrator, as well as the data imported or generated is captured and stored in RDF (Resource Description Framework). RDF defines a simple yet powerful scheme, "Subject > Predicate > Object", to describe relationships between data and makes all descriptions portable.
Cyberintegrator is a user friendly editor to several middleware software components that (1) enable users to easily include tools and data sets into a software/data unifying environment, (2) annotate data, tools and workflows with metadata, (3) visualize data and metadata, (4) share data and tools using local and remote context repository, (5) execute step-by-step workflows during scientific explorations, and (6) gather provenance information about tool executions and data creations.
The middleware software components are:
- multiple plug-in codes called executors for running external tools, Matlab scripts and Java codes,
- Tupelo data and metadata archiving system based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF) metadata model,
- portal systems, currently Cyber-collaboratory based on Liferay portal technology.
Cyberintegrator is a highly interactive environment to support and address the many needs of scientific processes. It was created at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The ultimate goal is to support scientific discoveries and to provide means for conducting research more efficiently. Development evolved from the Environmental Cyberinfrastructure Demonstrator (ECID) project to support environmental engineering, science and hydrology research.
The current implementation, first released in November 2007 enables users:
- to browse registries of data, software tools and computational resources,
- to create meta-workflows by example (step by step execution),
- to re-use and re-purpose meta-workflows,
- to execute meta-workflows locally or remotely,
- to incorporate heterogeneous code executors and tools, and link them transparently,
- to provide recommendations about workflow completion,
- to search for data, tools and resources in registries, and
- to support processing of streaming data and large size, out-of-core, data.
The Cyberintegrator editor is built on top of the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) to achieve its full functionality of re-configurable user interface and plug-and-play architecture critical for easy deployment of the Cyberintegrator application.
We would like to acknowledge multiple funding agencies for the support including NCSA, NSF, NASA and NARA. The main creators of Cyberintegrator are Rob Kooper, Luigi Marini and Peter Bajcsy with support from Barbara Minsker, Jim Myers, and Tim Nee.
Blog Posts
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Cyberintegrator 2.0 Beta 4
created by
Nov 20, 2009
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Combo box abilities
created by
Sep 25, 2009
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Matlab Executor
created by
Sep 20, 2009
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Cyberintegrator Tool Update v2
created by
Sep 18, 2009
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Cyberintegrator Tool
created by
Sep 18, 2009
