The design and realisation of the m yExperiment Virtual Research Environment for social sharing of workflows

In this paper we suggest that the full scientific potential of workflows will be achieved through mechanisms for sharing and collaboration, empowering scientists to spread their experimental protocols and to benefit from those of others. To facilitate this process we have designed and built the m yExperiment Virtual Research Environment for collaboration and sharing of workflows and experiments. In contrast to systems which simply make workflows available, m yExperiment provides mechanisms to support the sharing of workflows within and across multiple communities. It achieves this by adopting a social web approach which is tailored to the particular needs of the scientist. We present the motivation, design and realisation of m yExperiment. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.