Data provenance management for bioinformatics workflows using NoSQL database systems in a cloud computing environment

Computer science solutions for molecular biology problems are often presented in the form of workflows. There is a set of activities performed by different processing entities through managed tasks. Knowledge about the data trajectory throughout a given workflow enables reproducibility by data provenance. In order to reproduce an in silico bioinformatics experiment one must consider other aspects besides those steps followed by a workflow. Indeed, the computational settings in which the involved programs run is a requirement for reproducibility. Cloud computing technology may hide the technical details and make it easier for the user to set up such an on-demand environment. NoSQL database systems have also gained popularity, particularly in the cloud. Considering this particular scenario, we have planned and executed a research study about a bioinformatics workflow running in an IaaS cloud computing environment. We have persisted provenance data according to the PROV-DM model, using different types of NoSQL database systems. We present in this paper some preliminary results from our research work, where we have explored the characteristics of several NoSQL database systems to persist provenance data.