Integrating GALAXY workflows in a metadata management environment
Abstract
The Galaxy platform offers repositories of user data and related analysis processes (data histories and workflows). These repertories enable traceability and reproducibility of the processes within the platform. At a larger scale, to answer questions like "What protocol was used to analyze my data?" or "how were these data generated?", we could consider any protocol as a metadata set that annotates inputs and results.We present a preliminary approach for integrating the GALAXY workflows in an extensible meta-data management environment.Using ISA-tools, we have developed a formalism to describe an abstraction of data processing workflows. This specification, in the ISA-TAB format is named ISA-DATAFLOW.A conversion tool extracts a structured dataflow representation in GRAPHML, a generic XML graph format, from GALAXY workflows. This intermediary format can then be normalized using controlled vocabularies and converted into ISA-TAB following our ISA-DATAFLOW specification.We plan to integrate this work to propose advanced research functionalities within a virtual research environment (VRE) deployed on a geographically and thematically distributed infrastructure already using multiple Galaxy instances. Future developments will concern workflow meta-analysis and workflow composition assistance.