GPFlow: An Intuitive Environment Based Scientific Workflow

Abstract

Increasingly scientists are using collections of software tools in their research. These tools are typically used in concert, often necessitating laborious and error prone manual data reformatting and transfer. We present an intuitive workflow environment to support scientists with their research. The workflow, GPFlow, wraps legacy tools, presenting a high level, interactive web based frontend to scientists. The workflow backend is realized by a commercial grade workflow engine (BizTalk). The workflow model is inspired by spreadsheets and is novel in its support for an intuitive method of interaction as required by many scientists e.g. bioinformaticians. We apply GPFlow to two bioinformatics experiments and demonstrate its flexibility and simplicity.