A Comparison of Vistrails and Taverna, and Workflow Interoperability

In silico experiments in the field of bioinformatics generate large amounts of data since most of the tasks are done in an exploratory fashion. Workflows are one of the many tools used by scientists to model complex tasks.The interoperability of data generated from these tools plays an important role in improving the efficiency of such tools and also in verifying results from other experiments.We aim to compare workflow systems by integrating bioinformatics data in Vistrails and Taverna. We also look at how the two systems use the open provenance model that has been developed to bring provenance interoperability. We developed web services to perform similar functions of some workflows in Vistrails. With the services we were able to perform most of the tasks we planned using both systems. Differences in how lists of items are processed in the two systems results in differences in how workflows are composed in the two systems. In Taverna there is implicit iteration and Vistrails requires the use of additional modules to perform iteration.There are also differences in the execution times of workflows using web services, with workflows in Taverna taking longer than their counterparts in Vistrails. There are some similarities in the execution pattern of workflows if same workflow is invokedmultiple times, with the first invocation taking longer time than the subsequent ones