PROVA: Rule-Based Java-Scripting for a Bioinformatics Semantic Web

Abstract. Transparent information integration across distributed and heterogeneous data sources and computational tools is a prime concern for bioinformatics. Recently, there have been proposals for a semantic web addressing these requirements. A promising approach for such a semantic web are the integration of rules to specify and implement workflows and object-orientation to cater for computational aspects. We present PROVA, a Java-based rule-engine, which realises this integration. It enables one to separate a declarative description of information workflows from any implementation details and thus easily create and maintain code. We show how PROVA is used to compose an information and computation workflow involving – rules for specifying the workflow, – rules for reasoning over the data, – rules for accessing flat files, databases, and other services, and – rules involving heavy-duty computations. The resulting code is very compact and re-usable. We give a detailed ac...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: DILS
• Authors: Alexander Kozlenkov, Michael Schroeder
• Keywords: DILS 2004, PROVA, Semantic Web, Transparent Information Integration