The investigation proposes the application of an ontological semantic approach to describing workflow control patterns, research workflow step patterns, and the meaning of the workflows in terms of domain knowledge. The approach can provide wide opportunities for semantic refinement, reuse, and composition of workflows. Automatic reasoning allows verifying those compositions and implementations and provides machine-actionable workflow manipulation and problem-solving using workflows. The described approach can take into account the implementation of workflows in different workflow management systems, the organization of workflows collections in data infrastructures and the search for them, the semantic approach to the selection of workflows and resources in the research domain, the creation of research step patterns and their implementation reusing fragments of existing workflows, the possibility of automation of problemsolving based on the reuse of workflows. The application of the approach to CWFR conceptions is proposed.