This article is part of the supplement: Italian Society of Bioinformatics (BITS): Annual Meeting 2006 .

Research

Biowep: a workflow enactment portal for bioinformatics applications

Paolo Romano¹ , Ezio Bartocci² , Guglielmo Bertolini³ , Flavio De Paoli³ , Domenico Marra¹ , Giancarlo Mauri³ , Emanuela Merelli² and Luciano Milanesi^4,5

¹Bioinformatics and Structural Proteomics, National Cancer Research Institute (IST), Genova, Italy

²Department of Mathematics and Computer Science (DMI), University of Camerino, Camerino (MC), Italy

³Department of Informatics, Systems and Communication (DISCo), University of Milan "Bicocca", Milano, Italy

⁴Biomedical Technologies Institute (ITB), National Research Council, Milano, Italy

⁵CILEA, Segrate (MI), Italy

author email corresponding author email

BMC Bioinformatics 2007, 8(Suppl 1):S19doi:10.1186/1471-2105-8-S1-S19

Published:	8 March 2007

Abstract

Background

The huge amount of biological information, its distribution over the Internet and the heterogeneity of available software tools makes the adoption of new data integration and analysis network tools a necessity in bioinformatics. ICT standards and tools, like Web Services and Workflow Management Systems (WMS), can support the creation and deployment of such systems. Many Web Services are already available and some WMS have been proposed. They assume that researchers know which bioinformatics resources can be reached through a programmatic interface and that they are skilled in programming and building workflows. Therefore, they are not viable to the majority of unskilled researchers. A portal enabling these to take profit from new technologies is still missing.

Results

We designed biowep, a web based client application that allows for the selection and execution of a set of predefined workflows. The system is available on-line. Biowep architecture includes a Workflow Manager, a User Interface and a Workflow Executor. The task of the Workflow Manager is the creation and annotation of workflows. These can be created by using either the Taverna Workbench or BioWMS. Enactment of workflows is carried out by FreeFluo for Taverna workflows and by BioAgent/Hermes, a mobile agent-based middleware, for BioWMS ones. Main workflows' processing steps are annotated on the basis of their input and output, elaboration type and application domain by using a classification of bioinformatics data and tasks. The interface supports users authentication and profiling. Workflows can be selected on the basis of users' profiles and can be searched through their annotations. Results can be saved.

Conclusion

We developed a web system that support the selection and execution of predefined workflows, thus simplifying access for all researchers. The implementation of Web Services allowing specialized software to interact with an exhaustive set of biomedical databases and analysis software and the creation of effective workflows can significantly improve automation of in-silico analysis. Biowep is available for interested researchers as a reference portal. They are invited to submit their workflows to the workflow repository. Biowep is further being developed in the sphere of the Laboratory of Interdisciplinary Technologies in Bioinformatics – LITBIO.