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while the normal user can only build workflow instances by specifying the data
that is to be used. This is in contrast to Bio-jETI, where the average user is
regarded as workflow designer who works with a comprehensive, prepared do-
main model, but can create completely new workflows on his own and can also
refine the domain model by adding his intents or further expert knowledge.
8.1.3 Workflow Systems for Particular
Bioinformatics Applications
Another kind of bioinformatics workflow systems are tools that provide work-
flow support for very special purposes, such as particular biological disciplines
or the bioinformatics applications that are supported by a particular platform.
Technically, they follow a variety of approaches highly similar to the general
systems presented above. In case that automatic service composition func-
tionality is provided, it is naturally limited to the semantically annotated
services of the respective platforms.
BioMoby
BioMoby [341], initiated in 2001 at the Model Organism Bring Your own
Database Interface Conference (MOBY-DIC), is a service registry that has
been developed specifically for the bioinformatics domain. The actual registry,
MOBY Central, holds the services and their interface descriptions. In addition,
BioMoby comprises service and object hierarchies that describe the relation-
ship between the involved service and data types, respectively. These simple
ontologies provide a BioMoby-specific vocabulary that can be used by service
providers to annotate their services when registering them at MOBY Central.
Several clients support semantically guided service composition based on
BioMoby. With the MOBY-S Web Service Browser [84] it is, for instance,
possible to search for an appropriate next service and store the sequence
of executed tools as Taverna workflow, the REMORA web server [64] of-
fers functionality for the discovery and step-by-step composition of matching
BioMoby services, and the SeaHawk browser [116] facilitates the data-centric
composition workflows that are then executed in Taverna. However, since
development and maintenance of BioMoby have been abandoned in favor
of the standards-compliant SADI framework (see above), their future use is
questionable.
DDBJ Workflow Navigation System
The DDBJ's Workflow Navigation System [165] is a web-based platform that
works on the DDBJ [165] and NCBI e-Utils [270] web services. It allows
users to perform workflows on the fly, that is, applying multiple services
consecutively within the web browser, whereby the system assists in finding
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