Nowadays, life science makes heavily use of computer tools and web services to perform experiments. Instead of looking at one piece of data, experiments often deals with large amounts of (heterogeneous) data stored in (online) databases and web services to compare and analyse these data. I am investigating how workflow systems can be used, not only to connect these databases and web services, but also to simplify experiment construction, and to create reusable and reproducible experiments. Important research questions are:
Can a workflow system help the scientists to construct life science experiments?
Can a workflow system be used to create templates for experiments?
How can we create a workflow system that fits the way life scientists prefer to work?
How can exploration of the provenance data (the data stored during experiment execution) be simplified?
Based on the research results, we are also working on our own workflow tool, called “e-BioFlow”, which forms a test-bed to demonstrate our ideas.
