Using Semantic Web Technologies for Representing E-science Provenance
Life science researchers increasingly rely on the web as a primary source of data, forcing them to apply the same rigor to its use as to an experiment in the laboratory. The my Grid project is developing the use of workflows to explicitly capture web-based procedures, and provenance to describe how and why results were produced. Experience within my Grid has shown that this provenance metadata is formed from a complex web of heterogenous resources that impact on the production of a result. Therefore we have explored the use of Semantic Web technologies such as RDF, and ontologies to support its representation and used existing initiatives such as Jena and LSID, to generate and store such material. The effective presentation of complex RDF graphs is challenging. Haystack has been used to provide multiple views of provenance metadata that can be further annotated. This work therefore forms a case study showing how existing Semantic Web tools can effectively support the emerging requirements of life science research.
Life science researchers have made early and heavy use of Web technologies to access large datasets and applications [1]. Initiatives such as the Human Genome Project [2] have meant that rather than sequencing human genes in the laboratory, it is possible to download sequences from the Web. As well as data, tools are also available on the Web, and data are moved between tools to perform analyses [1]. The greater reliance on these resources as primary sources of data means ad hoc web browsing is giving way to a more systematic approach embodied by the term e-Science within the UK research community [3]. By analogy to the laboratory, web-based procedures to analyze or integrate data are called in silico experiments
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