PROVA: Rule-Based Java-Scripting for a Bioinformatics Semantic Web

Transparent information integration across distributed and heterogeneous data sources and computational tools is a prime concern for bioinformatics. Recently, there have been proposals for a semantic web addressing these requirements. Promising approaches for such a semantic web are the integration of rules to specify and implement workflows and object-orientation to cater for computational aspects. This paper presents PROVA, a Java-based rule-engine, which realises this integration. It enables one to separate a declarative description of information workflows from any implementation details and thus easily create and maintain code.