A Language-centered Approach for Transparent Experimentation Workflows

A common approach to handle computer-based model experimentation is to use scientific workflow management systems. Such systems are dataflow-oriented. To match this paradigm, the experimenter has to ”translate” the objectives of his experimentation into terms of tasks with their composition and inand output data. This challenge causes a significant effort, requires workflow expert knowledge and makes design and comprehension of such workflows problematic for the target audience who are usually not computer scientists. Hence, experimenters often do not use any adequate tool-support that would help them to describe and execute their experimentation processes completely. We argue, experimenters need new, more adequate means of expressions to handle their experimentation processes. Thus, we introduce our new language-centered approach that combines common workflow concepts, experimentation process characteristics and specifics of the domain where experimentation takes places. To demonstrate the practicability, we developed a prototype of such an experimentation workflow system.