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E. Bartocci, D. Cacciagrano, M. Di Berardini, E. Merelli, L. Vito:
"UBioLab: a web-LABoratory for Ubiquitous in-silico experiments";
Journal of Integrative Bioinformatics, 9 (2012), 1; 1 - 20.

The huge and dynamic amount of bioinformatic resources (e.g., data and tools) available nowadays in Internet represents a big challenge for biologists -for what concerns their man- agement and visualization- and for bioinformaticians -for what concerns the possibility of rapidly creating and executing in-silico experiments involving resources and activities spread over the WWW hyperspace. Any framework aiming at integrating such resources as in a physical laboratory has imperatively to tackle -and possibly to handle in a trans- parent and uniform way- aspects concerning physical distribution, semantic heterogeneity, co-existence of different computational paradigms and, as a consequence, of different in- vocation interfaces (i.e., OGSA for Grid nodes, SOAP for Web Services, Java RMI for Java objects, etc.). The framework UBioLab has been just designed and developed as a prototype following the above objective. Several architectural features -as those ones of being fully Web-based and of combining domain ontologies, Semantic Web and workflow techniques- give evidence of an effort in such a direction. The integration of a semantic knowledge management system for distributed (bioinfor- matic) resources, a semantic-driven graphic environment for defining and monitoring ubiq- uitous workflows and an intelligent agent-based technology for their distributed execution allows UBioLab to be a semantic guide for bioinformaticians and biologists providing (i) a flexible environment for visualizing, organizing and inferring any (semantics and compu- tational) "type" of domain knowledge (e.g., resources and activities, expressed in a declar- ative form), (ii) a powerful engine for defining and storing semantic-driven ubiquitous in-silico experiments on the domain hyperspace, as well as (iii) a transparent, automatic and distributed environment for correct experiment executions.

http://dx.doi.org/10.2390/biecoll-jib-2012-192

http://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/PubDat_212948.pdf