Towards an ontology-based recommender system for relevant bioinformatics workflows

BackgroundWith the large and diverse type of biological data, bioinformatic solutions are being more complex and computationally intensive. New specialized data skills need to be acquired by researchers in order to follow this development. Workflow Management Systems rise as an efficient way to automate tasks through abstract models in order to assist users during their problem solving tasks. However, current solutions could have several problems in reusing the developed models for given tasks. The large amount of heterogenous data and the lack of knowledge in using bioinformatics tools could mislead the users during their analyses. To tackle this issue, we propose an ontology-based workflow-mining framework generating semantic models of bioinformatic best practices in order to assist scientists. To this end, concrete workflows are extracted from scientific articles and then mined using a rich domain ontology.\n\nResultsIn this study, we explore the specific topics of phylogenetic analyses. We annotated more than 300 recent articles using different ontological concepts and relations. Relative supports (frequencies) of discovered workflow components in texts show interesting results of relevant resources currently used in the different phylogenetic analysis steps. Mining concrete workflows from texts lead us to discover abstract but relevant patterns of the best combinations of tools, parameters and input data for specific phylogenetic problems.\n\nConclusionsExtracted patterns would make workflows more intuitive and easy to be reused in similar situations. This could provide a stepping-stone into the identification of best practices and pave the road to a recommender system.