Related Work - User-Level Workflow Design: A Bioinformatics Perspective - page 167

8.1.4 Survey and Comparison with Bio-jETI

Although only covering a small selection of systems, this overview gives a
representative impression of the landscape of workflow management technol-
ogy that is available for bioinformatics application. In particular, it makes
clear that the systems differ in their focus on specific aspects of workflow
design (often because of originating from a particular field of research), and
that no single system fits all requirements completely. Interestingly, several
systems focus on semantics-based functionality, but do not address the basic
requirements for workflow systems adequately, and vice versa. Naturally, this
limits their applicability considerably.
Bio-jETI addresses the basic requirements for workflow systems as well as
the demands for semantics-based enhancements. Furthermore, it differenti-
ates itself from other bioinformatics workflow systems in particular through
its focus on control-flow modeling and through its workflow validation and
verification facilities.
Table 8.1 surveys the systems presented above systematically with respect
to the requirements listed in Section 1.1.3. The + indicates that the respec-
tive requirement is met by the system in a satisfying way, the - denotes
that it is not suciently realized, and the o is used when the requirement is
only partially fulfilled. A ++ is used when the respective system puts partic-
ular emphasis on this aspect, which typically means that the corresponding
requirement is addressed particularly well. Without going into the details
of the single properties, the table backs the following observations about
the considered systems and their relation to Bio-jETI with regard to the
requirements.

Abstraction (Requirement 1)

Abstraction from programming details is central to most systems. That is,
the systems clearly separate the workflow definition from its execution, and
are thus able to abstract from the underlying programming language code
and technical details, so that the user can deliberately focus on the service
orchestration. Not surprisingly, those systems that furthermore provide com-
prehensive but nevertheless intuitive desktop or web-based graphical user
interfaces have turned out to be most successful.
In Bio-jETI, abstraction is achieved by the rigorously service-oriented con-
ception of the SIBs and SLGs, and by the intuitive graphical user interface
of the jABC.

Powerful Workflow Model (Requirement 2)

While most bioinformatics systems focus on the data (flow) handling in the
workflow models, the domain-independent systems usually consider a focus
on control-flow modeling more adequate. In Bio-jETI, control-flow handling