Storing provenance data of genome project workflows using graph database

Many scientific experiments are designed as computational workflows in bioinformatics. However, the amount of data generated increases at every phase of each execution, hindering the identification of the source and the transformation of data. Therefore, it has become necessary to create new tools to store data provenance, mainly which resources and parameters were used to generate the results, among other information, to validate and publish the experiment. In this paper, we propose to use graph database to store data provenance using the PROV-DM model of bioinformatics workflows. To validate the model, we developed a simulator that worked as a logbook to capture data provenance. A workflow with real genomic data showed that very little additional data should be stored, which means that our provenance model can be easily included in genome projects.