Enhanced Usability of Managing Workflows in an Industrial Data Gateway
This work addresses usability issues for users of industrial data workflows and the gUSE community, representing an incremental improvement in workflow creation tools.
The paper tackled the non-intuitive and cumbersome workflow management in the gUSE system by developing the first integrated web-based workflow editor, reporting initial user feedback assessments to improve usability for industrial data workflows and the broader community.
The Grid and Cloud User Support Environment (gUSE) enables users convenient and easy access to grid and cloud infrastructures by providing a general purpose, workflow-oriented graphical user interface to create and run workflows on various Distributed Computing Infrastructures (DCIs). Its arrangements for creating and modifying existing workflows are, however, non-intuitive and cumbersome due to the technologies and architecture employed by gUSE. In this paper, we outline the first integrated web-based workflow editor for gUSE with the aim of improving the user experience for those with industrial data workflows and the wider gUSE community. We report initial assessments of the editor's utility based on users' feedback. We argue that combining access to diverse scalable resources with improved workflow creation tools is important for all big data applications and research infrastructures.