[Socbin] NETTAB 2005 Workshop on Workflows management in bioinformatics, Naples, October 2005

[Paolo Romano]

Dear colleagues,

NETTAB 2005 is being announced.

Do you have any plans for next october?

                           Workflows management:
          new abilities for the biological information overflow

                            5-7 October, 2005,
               Second University of Naples, Naples, Italy 

                       http://www.nettab.org/2005/

This is the fifth in a series of workshops that intend to introduce
and discuss some of the most innovative and promising network tools
and applications in bioinformatics.

The NETTAB 2005 workshop is focused on:
"Workflows management: new abilities for the biological information overflow". 

It is well known that bioinformatics has to cope with one of the hugest
amount of information in all knowledge domains. This does not only include
biological sequences and structures, but also and increasingly microarray
data, metabolic pathways, interaction maps, gene networks.
Moreover, there is an exponential increase of this information (e.g., DNA
sequences increased more than 10% during last three months), so that it
won't be locally manageable soon. 

This huge amount of data is also largely distributed over the network, has
heterogeneous data structures and information systems and, often, even a
different semantics. The same heterogeneicity applies to the many available
softwares. 

Moreover, the biomedical research domain is one of the fastest evoluting
research areas. New hypothesis and knowledges are accumulated daily, often
leading to new data and elaboration needs. User needs are often very peculiar,
deeply different from one application domain to another. In this frame, the
development of general purpose applications is difficult, both for the
different users' needs and the quickly accumulating knowledges, and limited
to essential tools. 

Biological information is made available to researchers through web sites.
Biologists connect to many sites and switch among them to submit and retrieve
preliminar and intermediate data. Final achievements are often the result
of a manual integration activity. The huge amount of information makes its
access un-exhaustive and inefficient and requires the development of complex
searching and retrieval softwares. They can be developed to perform this
integration activity, provided that they are taught the semantics of the
information, how to link data and how to pipe retrieval and analysis steps. 

According to the Workflow Management Coalition, a workflow is "a computerized
facilitation or automation of a business process, in whole or part".
Its main goal is the implemention of data analysis processes in standardized
environments. Its main advantages relates to: 

- effectiveness: being an automatic procedure, it frees the bioscientist from
  repetitive interactions with the web and it supports good practice, 
- reproducibility: analysis can be replicated over time, 
- reusability: intermediate results can be reused, 
- traceability: the workflow is carried out in a transparent analysis
  environment. 

Advantages of changing current biological information management from a
human-oriented to a machine-oriented approach are therefore clear. Machine
orientation is quickly improving, both as to technologies and tools and as
to its diffusion in the biomedical domain. Many Web Services have been
implemented, even by some of the most important network service Institute,
such as EBI and NCBI. Technologies related to registries of biological web
services and related implementation are also emerging, e.g. bioMOBY. 

It is therefore not surprising that implementation of workflows management
software already started. In recent years, we had Biopipe, an add-on to
bioperl for pipelines management, GPipe, an extension of the Pise interface,
and, especially, Taverna, the most well known workflow management tool that
is being developed within MyGrid project. And many others are coming. 

You can have a look at the presentation of the NETTAB 2005 workshop given
by Paolo Romano at the end of the NETTAB 2004 workshop in Camerino. 
See http://www.nettab.org/2005/IntroductionToNETTAB05.pps .
 
Best regards.

On behalf of the Organizing Committee
Paolo Romano
-- 
Paolo Romano (paolo.romano at istge.it)
National Cancer Research Institute
Largo Rosanna Benzi, 10, I-16132, Genova, Italy
Tel: +39-010-5737-288  Fax: +39-010-5737-295