An Intelligent System for Building Bioinformatics Workflows

In this paper a new intelligent system designed to support the researcher in the development of a workflow for bioinformatics experiments is presented. The proposed system is capable to suggest one or more strategies in order to resolve the selected problem and to support the user in the assembly of a workflow for complex experiments, using a a Knowledge base, representing the expertise about the application domain, and a Rule-Based system for decision-making activity. Moreover, the system can represent this workflow at different abstraction layers, freeing the user from implementation details and assisting him in the correct configuration of the algorithms. A sample workflow for protein complex extraction from protein-protein interaction network is presented in order to show the main features of the proposed workflow representation.