Web-Based Authoring and Secure Enactment of Bioinformatics Workflows

The recent advances in the field of bioinformatics present a number of challenges in the secure and efficient management and analysis of biological data resources. Workflow technologies aim to assist scientists and domain experts in the design of complex, long running, data and computing intensive experiments that involve many data processing and analysis tasks. In this paper we present a bioinformatics workflow authoring and execution environment that intends to greatly facilitate the whole lifecycle of such experiments. The main contributions of this work are a Web based, easy to use, graphical workflow designer and a BPEL compliant execution environment. The ethical and security requirements when dealing with sensitive personal data that are inherent in the field of bioinformatics impose the introduction of ldquocredentials delegationrdquo in the workflow execution and we describe its design and implementation through bridging Grid security mechanisms with business workflows technologies.