Lifecycle Support for Scientific Investigations: Integrating Data, Computing, and Workflows

Scientific workflows have emerged as a model for representing the complex processes carried out by scientists throughout their investigations, encompassing research activities corresponding to data collection, data flow, computation, output analysis, and all the ways these are used together to produce results. Existing infrastructures support elements of the workflow, such as data repositories or computing services, but these are not integrated as interactive environments that provide full investigation lifecycle support. The digital environment for enabling data-driven sciences (DEEDS) project brought together domain scientists and computer scientists to create a platform that provides interactive end-to-end support for diverse scientific workflows. Key among requirements were preservation, provenance, coupling of data and computing, results traceability, collaborative sharing, exploration, and publication of the full products of research work. This paper highlights use cases that contributed to DEEDS development and concludes with lessons learned from a process that joined experiences and perspectives from diverse science domains.