AstroTaverna—Building workflows with Virtual Observatory services

•AstroTaverna is a plugin we developed for the Taverna workflow management system.•It integrates VO web services as first-class building blocks in Taverna scientific workflows.•Digital capture of otherwise lost procedural steps, manually performed in GUIs, is now possible.•Integration of STIL Tool Set, Aladin VO software and SAMP-compliant astronomy tools.•It allows enhanced documentation and comprehensive view of automated digital VO recipes.

Despite the long tradition of publishing digital datasets in Astronomy, and the existence of a rich network of services providing astronomical datasets in standardized interoperable formats through the Virtual Observatory (VO), there has been little use of scientific workflow technologies in this field. In this paper we present AstroTaverna, a plugin that we have developed for the Taverna Workbench scientific workflow management system. It integrates existing VO web services as first-class building blocks in Taverna workflows, allowing the digital capture of otherwise lost procedural steps manually performed in e.g. GUI tools, providing reproducibility and re-use. It improves the readability of digital VO recipes with a comprehensive view of the entire automated execution process, complementing the scarce narratives produced in the classic documentation practices, transforming them into living tutorials for an efficient use of the VO infrastructure. The plugin also adds astronomical data manipulation and transformation tools based on the STIL Tool Set and the integration of Aladin VO software, as well as interactive connectivity with SAMP-compliant astronomy tools.

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