Bio-SENSE: semantic web services for bioinformatics provenance

Abstract

[Introduction]: There is significant progress being made towards building Semantic Web Services platforms to support bioinformatics, with “myGrid” [1] and “Bio-Moby” [2] being the two prominent examples. However, the management of provenance—which refers to the evolution of information (i.e., from where and how the information is obtained)—is still in very early stage in these systems. The benefits of scientific provenance management are two fold: 1. Help to determine the data's value, accuracy and authorship; 2. Enable reproducibility and facilitate users in interpreting and understanding results that can be more important than the results themselves. While there are existing efforts to support process sharing among users—such as “myExperiment” (www.myexperiment.org)—it requires the users to generate the process manually, which is time consuming and error prone.