Traceability Mechanisms for Bioinformatics Scientific Workflows

Contents

Traceability and Provenance are often used interchangeably in e-Science, being associated with the need scientists have to document their experiments, and so allow experiments to be checked and reproduced by others. These terms have, however, different meanings: provenance is more often associated with data origins, whereas traceability concerns the interlinking and execution of processes. This paper proposes a set of mechanisms to deal with this last aspect, the solution is based on database research combined with scientific workflows, plus domain-specific knowledge stored in ontology structures. This meets a need from bioinformatics laboratories, where the majority of computer systems do not support traceability facilities. These mechanisms have been implemented in a prototype, and an example using the genome assembly problem is given.