In Services: Data Management for In Silico Workflows

Scientific workflows are emerging as a suitable practice to support bioinformatics experiments. Specially, in distributed environments, where workflow steps are located at different sites, workflows can create an independent and interoperable environment between the scientific applications and databases, when combined with the Web Services technology. Web Services have been useful as legacy code wrappers, in order to facilitate distributed workflow definition and orchestration. However, there is an increasing need to address workflow intermediate data management. This work presents the In Services system that provides support for bioinformatics workflows redefinition. This redefinition enables the user to include specific data management services, according to his needs. These services are able to filter, store and retrieve data that are generated in each workflow execution step.