@ARTICLE{BCMS07,
  title = {{BioWMS: a web-based Workflow Management System for bioinformatics}},
  author = {Bartocci, Ezio and Corradini, Flavio and Merelli, Emanuela and Scortichini, Lorenzo},
  journal = {BMC Bioinformatics},
  pages = {S2},
  abstract = {Background
      An in-silico experiment can be naturally specified as a workflow of activities
      implementing, in a standardized environment, the process of data and control
      analysis. A workflow has the advantage to be reproducible, traceable and
      compositional by reusing other workflows. In order to support the daily work of
      a bioscientist, several Workflow Management Systems (WMSs) have been proposed in
      bioinformatics. Generally, these systems centralize the workflow enactment and
      do not exploit standard process definition languages to describe, in order to
      be reusable, workflows. While almost all WMSs require heavy stand-alone
      applications to specify new workflows, only few of them provide a web-based
      process definition tool.
      
      Results
      We have developed BioWMS, a Workflow Management System that supports, through a
      web-based interface, the definition, the execution and the results management of
      an in-silico experiment. BioWMS has been implemented over an agent-based
      middleware. It dynamically generates, from a user workflow specification, a
      domain-specific, agent-based workflow engine. Our approach exploits the
      proactiveness and mobility of the agent-based technology to embed, inside
      agents behaviour, the application domain features. Agents are workflow
      executors and the resulting workflow engine is a multiagent system – a
      distributed, concurrent system – typically open, flexible, and adaptative. A
      demo is available at http://litbio.unicam.it:8080/biowms.
      
      Conclusion
      BioWMS, supported by Hermes mobile computing middleware, guarantees the
      flexibility, scalability and fault tolerance required to a workflow enactment
      over distributed and heterogeneous environment. BioWMS is funded by the FIRB
      project LITBIO (Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Technologies in
      Bioinformatics).},
  volume = {8},
  number = {Suppl 1},
  year = {2007},
  url = {http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/8/S1/S2},
}