Enhanced reproducibility of SADI Web service workflows with Galaxy and Docker

Abstract

Background: Semantic Web technologies have been widely applied in the life sciences, for example by data providers like OpenLifeData and through Web Services frameworks like SADI. The recently reported OpenLifeData2SADI project offers access to the vast OpenLifeData data store through SADI services. Findings: This article describes how to merge data retrieved from the OpenLifeData warehouse with other SADI services using the Galaxy bioinformatics analysis platform, thus making this semantic data more amenable to complex analyses. This is demonstrated using a working example, which is made distributable and reproducible through a Docker image that includes a pre-configured Galaxy server, along with the data and workflows that constitute the demonstration. Conclusions: The combination of Galaxy and Docker offers a straightforward technical solution for faithfully reproducing and sharing complex data retrieval and analysis workflows based on the SADI Semantic Web service design patterns.