Sesame: A new bioinformatics semantic workflow design system

Biologists have become increasingly dependent on bioinformatics tools to analyze and interpret their datasets. The number, variety and complexity of these bioinformatics tools have increased dramatically and they have become more and more computationally complex, expensive and resource intensive. Powerful workflow design systems have been developed to automate the execution of set of tools for a specific task. However, designing a complex executable workflow using such tools still requires considerable computational expertise or the help from a bioinformatics expert. In this paper, we developed Sesame, a bioinformatics semantic workflow design system. We have designed a new ontology for bioinformatics tools and services (OBTS) and proposed an ontology driven semantic workflow design mechanism, using this new OBTS. Compared to an executable workflow, the semantic workflow is at the level of biological concepts that are closer to the scientific research. Biologists will greatly benefit from the decoupling of semantic workflow design from executable workflow design with computational implementation details. Currently, a prototype version of Sesame system has been implemented and deployed. Sesame will allow biologists to efficiently perform complex data analysis to address scientific questions.