Towards Reproducible Bioinformatics: The OpenBioC Scientific Workflow Environment The highly competitive environment of postgenomics biomedical research is pushing towards the production of highly qualified results and their utilization in clinical practice. Due to this pressure, an important factor of scientific progress has been underestimated namely, the reproducibility of the results. To this end, it is critical to design and implement computational platforms that enable seamless and unhindered access to distributed biodata, software and computational infrastructures. Furthermore, the need to support collaboration and form synergistic activities between the engaged researchers is also raised, as the mean to achieve consensus on respective scientific discoveries. The aforementioned needs and requirements underlie the motivations for the development of OpenBioC workflow environment, and determine its fundamental objectives. The insufficiencies of current workflow editing and execution environments are explored, and the keydirections to advance over an environment that supports reproducibility are stated. The basic components and functionality of the OpenBioC initial implementation (beta version) are detailed.

Data Provenance Management of Bioinformatics Workflows in Federated Clouds In Bioinformatics, the reproducibility of experiments is a fundamental principle to which the data provenance significantly contributes through the acquisition and management of information about the trajectory of the data in a workflow. In addition to the data provenance, aspects such as program configurations and the entire computational environment must be considered to achieve this goal. Cloud computing can provide computational resources, hiding technical details and providing an accessible and configurable ondemand environment for researchers. Cloud federation enables the broad distribution of services and a flexible combination of computing power. Considering this particular scenario, we propose a management platform that collects the provenance data of Bioinformatics workflows allowing portability between different clouds in federated clouds using the Infrastructure as a Service model. This platform is composed of tools that support running these workflows with data provenance captured in NoSQL databases. The retrospective data provenance is captured according to the PROVDM norms. The findings indicate that the proposed platform can be used for some of the most commoninly available clouds.