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8
Related Work
Due to massive effort in tailoring workflow management systems towards the
bioinformatics domain and the development of thoroughly specific systems in
the last years, several frameworks that support service orchestration in bioin-
formatics are available today. They provide a wide range of different features,
adding convenience for the user in different ways. This chapter discusses the
relation of Bio-jETI to other approaches to bioinformatics workflow man-
agement. Therefore, Section 8 reviews a number of different bioinformatics
workflow systems and compares them to Bio-jETI. Then, Section 8.2 takes a
closer look at the substantial differences between the capabilities of control-
flow and data-flow modeling: The nature of the data flow and control flow
specifications is essential for the semantic interpretation of a workflow model,
while other features are usually less inherent in the systems. The study is
carried out by means of a detailed comparison of Bio-jETI and Taverna, two
systems for bioinformatics workflow management that look very similar at
the first glance, but are in fact very different precisely because they follow
different paradigms for control-flow and data-flow modeling.
8.1 Workflow Systems in Bioinformatics
Several approaches for meeting the service orchestration challenge in bioinfor-
matics have been proposed and followed in recent years, ranging from simple
scripting languages (like, e.g. Perl [17] or Ruby [13]) to sophisticated deduc-
tive systems (like, e.g. BioBike [282]). In particular, a number of dedicated
workflow environments for bioinformatics applications has been developed,
also following a wide range of different approaches and having different char-
acteristics. This section gives an overview of more or less popular workflow
management systems in the bioinformatics domain. Three groups of systems
are considered: domain-independent workflow systems that have known appli-
cations in the bioinformatics domain (Section 8.1.1), workflow systems have
been designed for the bioinformatics domain (Section 8.1.2), and workflow
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