Use of semantics in designing and executing scientific workflows

Abstract

Galaxy is a bioinformatics framework which contains a number of tools to perform analysis on biological data. There exist a huge number of Web services for bioinformatics. However, at present Galaxy does not have any support for Web services. The focus of this thesis is to add Web service capability to Galaxy. For this purpose we have created a universal REST client and a universal SOAP client and added them as tools to Galaxy. The thesis discusses these two clients in detail. It also discusses how these clients can be used with other Galaxy tools in a workflow. It also presents multiple ways of utilizing semantic annotations to facilitate discovery, composition and user interaction with Web services and processes/workflows.