Providing Map and GPS Assistance to Service Composition in Bioinformatics

The wide use of Web services and scientific workflows has enabled bioinformaticians to reuse experimental resources and streamline data processing in a Web-scale manner. This paper presents a follow-up work of our network analysis on my Experiment, an online scientific workflow repository. The motivation comes from two common questions proposed by bio-scientists: 1) Given services which I plan to use, what are other services usually used together with them? and 2) Given two or more services I plan to use together, can I find an operation chain to connect them based on others´ past usage? Aiming to provide a system-level GPS-like support to answer the two questions, we present Service Map, a network model established to study the best practice of service use. We propose two approaches over the Service Map: association rule mining and relation-aware, cross-workflow searching. Our approaches were validated using the real-life data obtained from the my Experiment repository. Empirical statistics of the constructed service network are also reported.