ZIB structure prediction pipeline: Composing a complex biological workflow through Web services

Abstract

In life sciences, scientists are confronted with an exponential growth of biological data, especially in the genomics and proteomics area. The efficient management and use of these data, and its transformation into knowledge are basic requirements for biological research. Therefore, integration of diverse applications and data from geographically distributed computing resources will become a major issue. We will present the status of our efforts for the realization of an automated protein prediction pipeline as an example for a complex biological workflow scenario in a Grid environment based on Web services. This case study demonstrates the ability of an easy orchestration of complex biological workflows based on Web services as building blocks and Triana as workflow engine. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.