Retrieving functionally similar bioinformatics workflows using TF-IDF filtering

Abstract

In bioinformatics, dealing with tools to analyze biological data becomes important. Those tools are provided by various institutions and the number of the tools is rapidly increasing. Recently many institutions have been offering those tools and access to databases with Web service technologies. The workflow technology is one of the ways to manage those tools and it is becoming available in bioinformatics. In order to compose workflows, several research groups develop and provide workflow composing tools. And consequently, the concept “Workflow Reuse” is also arisen in order to help workflow composition. Nevertheless it is still difficult to search for the reusable workflows from the repository of workflows in the current situation. In this paper, we propose a method to extract reusable workflows from the repository by using currently available information. We could extract some functionally similar workflows as reusable ones. By extracting reusable workflows efficiently, researchers can compose their workflow more easily.