Investigating reproducibility and tracking provenance - A genomic workflow case study

Abstract

Background: Computational bioinformatics workflows are extensively used to analyse genomics data, with different approaches available to support implementation and execution of these workflows. Reproducibility is one of the core principles for any scientific workflow and remains a challenge, which is not fully addressed. This is due to incomplete understanding of reproducibility requirements and assumptions of workflow definition approaches. Provenance information should be tracked and used to capture all these requirements supporting reusability of existing workflows. Results: We have implemented a complex but widely deployed bioinformatics workflow using three representative approaches to ..