Curating Scientific Web Services and Workflows

A bewildering array of digital resources is available to the modern researcher, ranging from libraries of articles and data collections to analytical tools and visualization applications, many publicly available. Take bioinformatics, for example. Nucleic Acids Research describes more than 1,000 databases drawn from a 'Bioinformatics Nation' of different subdisciplines, research teams, and institutes. The same is true for chemistry, astronomy, earth sciences, and just about any information-rich scientific area. These digital resources are combined and their data aggregated and analyzed in the day-to-day work of skilled scientific investigators. But even though we are familiar with the need to curate our data for dissemination and for the long term, we must not neglect the curation and cataloguing of the processes that we use to search, integrate, and analyze that data.