Supporting the design, communication and management of bioinformatic protocols through the leaf tool

Abstract

In Bioinformatic studies, a prototypical approach is common practice when dealing with data analysis. While the source code of such tools provides by itself a precious tool to replicate the analysis, this is in practice often hard to realize. In this paper we try to formalize the concept of protocol in bioinformatic data analysis and introduce the Leaf System, including a graph design language to define the main steps of the data analysis and a Python engine to automatically and efficiently apply it with support for the management of data resources. The tool is undergoing testing and documentation process and is available upon request from the authors. © Springer-Verlag 2012.