Oncology over Internet: integrating data and analysis of oncology interest on the net by means of workflows P. Romano 1 , G. Bertolini 2 , F. De Paoli 2 , M. Fattore 3 , D. Marra 1 , G. Mauri 2 , E. Merelli 4 , I. Porro 5 , S. Scaglione 5 , L. Milanesi 6,7 1 National Cancer Research Institute, Genoa, Italy, 2 University of Milan Bicocca, Italy, 3 National Research Council, Genoa, Italy, 4 University of Camerino, Italy, 5 University of Genoa, Italy, 6 National Research Council, Milan, Italy, 7 CILEA, Segrate, Italy Introduction The Human Genome Project has transformed biology by providing a list of all genes and proteins, but the field has since then expanded to the management, processing, analysis and visualization of large quantities of data from genomics, proteomics, medicinal chemistry and drug screening. This huge amount of data and the heterogeneity of software tools that are used for its distribution make the tasks of searching, retrieving and integrating the information very difficult. Data is retrieved and analysed by hand by accessing several bioinformatics servers and transferring the data by FTP clients or web browsers by the “cut and paste” technique. The need is felt for a system that is able to improve the information accessibility. Such a system should be able to automate the accesses to the remote sites, in order to retrieve the information from the specific database or for using the appropriate software tools to achieve the desired analysis. At the same time, it should be able also to "understand" the information that it is managing. Among current ICT technologies, workflow management systems in connection with Web Services seem to be the most promising ones. Workflows are defined as “computerized facilitations or automations of a business process, in whole or part" (Workflow Management Coalition). Their goal is the implementation of data analysis processes in standardized environments and their main advantages relate to effectiveness, reproducibility, reusability of intermediate results and traceability. Some workflow management systems have already been proposed and are being increasingly applied in the biomedical domain. Some of them are add-ons to other tools, like biopipe [1], a perl module designed to be used with bioperl, and GPipe, an extension of the Pise interface [2]. Other systems are autonomous applications that are being developed either by industries, like the Bioinformatic Workflow Builder Interface – BioWBI from IBM [3], and Pipeline Pilot from SciTegic, or by academic and research institutes, like Wildfire from the Singapore Bioinformatics Institute, and Taverna Workbench [4] from the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI). Web Services (WS) are software oriented network services which communicate usually by using SOAP (Simple Object Architecture Protocol, a framework for the distribution of XML structured information) over HTTP. They offer a good, standard solution for automated retrieval of information. Standards are available or have been proposed for their retrieval and identification, description and composition [5]. They allow software applications to access data in a semantic- aware way since being in the form of XML documents their contents can be made visible and when metadata is given, interpretation of semantic information becomes possible.. Many WS and WS deployment tools have recently been set up in the biomedical domain and perspectives for their widespread use has been proposed [6,7]. Among