Mobyle is the successor of Pise, a system that provides a web environment to define and execute bioinformatics analyses. The inception of the new system is mainly based on the need to extend functionalities towards services interoperability and data integration, while optimizing the usability of the interface for a public of biologists.

The Mobyle system is based on a set of program descriptions that automate their use, from the construction of the web interface up to the software execution. These descriptions also include a syntactic and semantic description of the processed biological data, which are the technical basis of advanced features such as:
  data reusability: the tagging of the user data facilitates the reuse of input values or results between different programs.
  automatic data validation and format conversion: the description of the expected data and their format allows to verify and convert input values if necessary.
  service discovery and workflow authoring assistance: services are provided through a searchable menu; furthermore, type compatibility mechanisms between results and potential program inputs let users either interactively pipe tasks or build complete workflows before to run them.

Based on extensive user studies, we developped the end-user interface as a Web Portal that provides a global and integrated view of all the elements needed to perform analyses, such as the available programs, the submitted jobs and the data of interest.

Project webpage here.