A Linked Data Approach to Sharing Workflows and Workflow Results

A bioinformatics analysis pipeline is often highly elaborate, due to the inherent complexity of biological systems and the variety and size of datasets. A digital equivalent of the ‘Materials and Methods’ section in wet laboratory publications would be highly beneficial to bioinformatics, for evaluating evidence and examining data across related experiments, while introducing the potential to find associated resources and integrate them as data and services. We present initial steps towards preserving bioinformatics ‘materials and methods’ by exploiting the workflow paradigm for capturing the design of a data analysis pipeline, and RDF to link the workflow, its component services, run-time provenance, and a personalized biological interpretation of the results. An example shows the reproduction of the unique graph of an analysis procedure, its results, provenance, and personal interpretation of a text mining experiment. It links data from Taverna, myExperiment.org, BioCatalogue.org, and ConceptWiki.org. The approach is relatively ‘light-weight’ and unobtrusive to bioinformatics users

A Query Integrator and Manager for the Query Web

We introduce two concepts: the Query Web as a layer of interconnected queries over the document web and the semantic web, and a Query Web Integrator and Manager (QI) that enables the Query Web to evolve. QI permits users to write, save and reuse queries over any web accessible source, including other queries saved in other installations of QI. The saved queries may be in any language (e.g. SPARQL, XQuery); the only condition for interconnection is that the queries return their results in some form of XML. This condition allows queries to chain off each other, and to be written in whatever language is appropriate for the task. We illustrate the potential use of QI for several biomedical use cases, including ontology view generation using a combination of graph-based and logical approaches, value set generation for clinical data management, image annotation using terminology obtained from an ontology web service, ontology-driven brain imaging data integration, small-scale clinical data integration, and wider-scale clinical data integration. Such use cases illustrate the current range of applications of QI and lead us to speculate about the potential evolution from smaller groups of interconnected queries into a larger query network that layers over the document and semantic web. The resulting Query Web could greatly aid researchers and others who now have to manually navigate through multiple information sources in order to answer specific questions

Enhancing Workflow with a Semantic Description of Scientific Intent

Peer reviewedPreprin

Automatic annotation of bioinformatics workflows with biomedical ontologies

Legacy scientific workflows, and the services within them, often present scarce and unstructured (i.e. textual) descriptions. This makes it difficult to find, share and reuse them, thus dramatically reducing their value to the community. This paper presents an approach to annotating workflows and their subcomponents with ontology terms, in an attempt to describe these artifacts in a structured way. Despite a dearth of even textual descriptions, we automatically annotated 530 myExperiment bioinformatics-related workflows, including more than 2600 workflow-associated services, with relevant ontological terms. Quantitative evaluation of the Information Content of these terms suggests that, in cases where annotation was possible at all, the annotation quality was comparable to manually curated bioinformatics resources.Comment: 6th International Symposium on Leveraging Applications (ISoLA 2014 conference), 15 pages, 4 figure

CaosDB - Research Data Management for Complex, Changing, and Automated Research Workflows

Here we present CaosDB, a Research Data Management System (RDMS) designed to ensure seamless integration of inhomogeneous data sources and repositories of legacy data. Its primary purpose is the management of data from biomedical sciences, both from simulations and experiments during the complete research data lifecycle. An RDMS for this domain faces particular challenges: Research data arise in huge amounts, from a wide variety of sources, and traverse a highly branched path of further processing. To be accepted by its users, an RDMS must be built around workflows of the scientists and practices and thus support changes in workflow and data structure. Nevertheless it should encourage and support the development and observation of standards and furthermore facilitate the automation of data acquisition and processing with specialized software. The storage data model of an RDMS must reflect these complexities with appropriate semantics and ontologies while offering simple methods for finding, retrieving, and understanding relevant data. We show how CaosDB responds to these challenges and give an overview of the CaosDB Server, its data model and its easy-to-learn CaosDB Query Language. We briefly discuss the status of the implementation, how we currently use CaosDB, and how we plan to use and extend it

The INCF Digital Atlasing Program: Report on Digital Atlasing Standards in the Rodent Brain

The goal of the INCF Digital Atlasing Program is to provide the vision and direction necessary to make the rapidly growing collection of multidimensional data of the rodent brain (images, gene expression, etc.) widely accessible and usable to the international research community. This Digital Brain Atlasing Standards Task Force was formed in May 2008 to investigate the state of rodent brain digital atlasing, and formulate standards, guidelines, and policy recommendations.

Our first objective has been the preparation of a detailed document that includes the vision and specific description of an infrastructure, systems and methods capable of serving the scientific goals of the community, as well as practical issues for achieving
the goals. This report builds on the 1st INCF Workshop on Mouse and Rat Brain Digital Atlasing Systems (Boline et al., 2007, _Nature Preceedings_, doi:10.1038/npre.2007.1046.1) and includes a more detailed analysis of both the current state and desired state of digital atlasing along with specific recommendations for achieving these goals