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9.2.3 Transfer to other Application Domains
From an abstract informatics point of view, this work can be regarded as a
case-oriented analysis and subsequent customization of a family of technolo-
gies, focusing on how the jABC modeling framework and associated tech-
nologies can be brought into application in a particular application domain.
Other examples of comprehensive jABC applications are, for instance, the
Genesys framework for the construction of code generators developed by
Sven Jorges (and described in detail in his dissertation [142]), the LearnLib
Studio [260, 220, 219] for the design and management of automata learning
processes, the OCS conference system [238], the applications for business pro-
cess management by Markus Doedt [87, 199], and the project management
applications developed by Steve Boßelmann [283].
The strong focus on semantics and constraints that is central for the bioin-
formatics workflow management methodology described in this topic, how-
ever, is so far unique among the larger jABC applications. As they have
proven themselves successful, it will be interesting to challenge the developed
methods for constraint-driven workflow management also in the scope of other
existing jABC applications and in further, especially scientific, application do-
mains. As the methods presented in this topic have been developed with a
focus on the bioinformatics application domain, it is in fact likely that they
will especially be adequate for use in other scientific disciplines, which often
have a similar technical infrastructure and technically similar data analysis
processes. Tuning our constraint-based methods for use in a particular ap-
plication domains inevitably leads to a better understanding of the domain
characteristics: which components might be used for a certain task, which
causalities need to be considered, and which incompatibilities constrain the
variation potential are some examples of relevant knowledge. All this can
be profitably used for the identification and adequate formalization of the
domain knowledge that is actually critical for any concrete application.
Concretely, there have already been first considerations about applying the
constraint-driven workflow design approach in the fields of computer linguis-
tics and geoinformatics (particularly geographic information systems, GIS)
data analysis processes:
•
The computer linguistics community only begins to adopt service-oriented
thinking and to provide software components for flexible re-use. First ex-
ample applications (such as, e.g., the pipeline for computational historical
linguistics described in [308]) show that workflows can contribute to an ad-
equate management of variant-rich, complex analysis processes also in this
field.
•
For GIS applications, there is a plethora of tools, data and services avail-
able (cf., e.g., [316, 222]), constituting a service infrastructure similar to
that of the bioinformatics domain. Likewise, the concept of using work-
flow methods for realizing GIS processes grows in popularity (cf., e.g.,
[191, 352]), and being aware of the importance of user-level access to the
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