ISCB-Asia/SCCG 2012, session on Workflows and the Cloud for Reproducible Computing


Kazuhiko Fukui
Computational Biology Research Center, AIST

Development of Bioinformatics Workflows using Platform and Semantic Technologies

Abstract

Workflow systems are now becoming an indispensable system for addressing how to treat large-scale data and to acquire additional values on the data efficiently by integrating numerous computational tools/software. We have developed a workflow which enables users to compose a combination of analytical tools and visualize the integration of results on a platform. On this platform, users can combine independent analytical nodes from a repository of the bioinformatics tools developed at CBRC and external tools/databases by selecting them in an easy drag-and-drop manner. The analysis tools utilize SOAP and SADI (Semantic Automated Discovery and Integration) services, protocol and framework enabling communication with remote PC program and data. In addition, we add a RDF (Resource Description Framework) input-and-output function to analysis tools using SADI framework, making possible large-scale analysis combined with RDF database. Our system is designed flexibly for ever-growing biological data and can be useful for computational analysis to improve productivity, efficiency and reproducibility.

Biography

Dr. Kazuhiko Fukui is the team leader of Integration of Biological Information at the Computational Biology Research Center (CBRC), National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan.

He received his Ph.D. in Chemical Physics from the Department of Chemistry, University of Nevada (1997). He was a Research Associate at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Chemical and Analytical Sciences Division (2000). In 2001, he joined CBRC at AIST. Currently, he is also a Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Science and Engineering, Waseda University and a Visiting Professor at Tokyo University of Science.

His research interests are within Bioinformatics, Computational Biology and Mass Spectrometry, particularly in integration of analytical tools and molecular simulations of complex proteins.