ServiceMap: Providing map and GPS assistance to service composition in bioinformatics

The wide use of Web services and scientific workflows has enabled bioinformaticians to reuse experimental resources and streamline data processing. This paper presents a follow-up work of our network analysis on the myExperiment, an online scientific workflow repository. The motivation comes from two common questions raised by bio-scientists: 1) Given the services that I plan to use, are there other services usually used together with them? and 2) Given two or more services I plan to use together, is there an operation chain to connect them based on others' past usage? Aiming to provide a system-level GPS-like support to answer the two questions, we present ServiceMap, a network model established to study the best practice of service use. Two approaches are proposed over the ServiceMap: association rule mining and relation-aware, cross-workflow searching. Both approaches were validated using the real-life data obtained from the myExperiment repository. © 2011 IEEE.