Participatory Design of Pipeline tools and Web services in bioinformatics

International audienceIn this position paper, we describe a project for developing tools tosupport biologists using bioinformatics programs and data within adistributed architecture. This architecture relies on the use of Webservices as a layer for simple and interactive pipelines, and as ameans to help in services discovery. The design of the software isrooted in a study of biologists' work practices with bioinformaticstools that we observed during interviews. A video brainstormingworkshop provided us with information about critical features of thefuture system. After a brief introduction about existing e-scienceprojects in bioinformatics, we describe the outcome of the interviewsand workshop and the challenges to face in the technical architecturewe envision