Biological Experiments on the Grid: A Novel Workflow Management Platform

Bioinformatics is one of the key application of this century. The attention received by all the current media is astonishing and both academics and industries are carrying on researches in many fields related to computational methods applied to life sciences. In this paper we present some results obtained within an Italian funded research project called ESCOGITARE. We present the design and implementation of a grid-based architecture for scientific workflow management that, differently from others, allows the dynamic discovery of existing Web services in combination to ad-hoc developed ones. The paper presents the main features of current scientific workflow management systems. Using a real-world case study (taken by the agricultural research domain), we show how we overcome the limitations of current approaches.