Title: An ontology-based framework for bioinformatics workflows

Authors: Luciano A. Digiampietri, Jose de J. Perez-Alcazar, Claudia Bauzer Medeiros

Addresses: Institute of Computing, University of Campinas, CP 6176, 13084-971, Campinas, SP, Brazil. ' EACH, University of Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, SP, Brazil. ' Institute of Computing, University of Campinas, CP 6176, 13084-971, Campinas, SP, Brazil

Abstract: The proliferation of bioinformatics activities brings new challenges – how to understand and organise these resources, how to exchange and reuse successful experimental procedures, and to provide interoperability among data and tools. This paper describes an effort toward these directions. It is based on combining research on ontology management, AI and scientific workflows to design, reuse and annotate bioinformatics experiments. The resulting framework supports automatic or interactive composition of tasks based on AI planning techniques and takes advantage of ontologies to support the specification and annotation of bioinformatics workflows. We validate our proposal with a prototype running on real data.

Keywords: bioinformatics workflows; bioinformatics ontologies; bioinformatics tool composition; bioinformatics data; bioinformatics tool annotation; interoperability; ontology management; artificial intelligence; AI planning; experimental design; experiments reuse.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBRA.2007.015003

International Journal of Bioinformatics Research and Applications, 2007 Vol.3 No.3, pp.268 - 285

Published online: 04 Sep 2007 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article