BioWMS: a web-based Workflow Management System for bioinformatics

Background: An in-silico experiment can be naturally specified as a workflow of activities implementing, in a standardized environment, the process of data and control analysis. A workflow has the advantage to be reproducible, traceable and compositional by reusing other workflows. In order to support the daily work of a bioscientist, several Workflow Management Systems (WMSs) have been proposed in bioinformatics. Generally, these systems centralize the workflow enactment and do not exploit standard process definition languages to describe, in order to be reusable, workflows. While almost all WMSs require heavy stand-alone applications to specify new workflows, only few of them provide a web-based process definition tool. Results: We have developed BioWMS, a Workflow Management System that supports, through a web-based interface, the definition, the execution and the results management of an in-silico experiment. BioWMS has been implemented over an agent-based middleware. It dynamical...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Ezio Bartocci, Flavio Corradini, Emanuela Merelli, Lorenzo Scortichini
• Keywords: BMCBI 2007, Workflow, Workflow Enactment, Workflow Management System