  One of the main challenges for biomedical research lies in the
computer-assisted integrative study of large and increasingly complex
combinations of data in order to understand molecular mechanisms. The
preservation of the materials and methods of such computational experiments
with clear annotations is essential for understanding an experiment, and this
is increasingly recognized in the bioinformatics community. Our assumption is
that offering means of digital, structured aggregation and annotation of the
objects of an experiment will provide necessary meta-data for a scientist to
understand and recreate the results of an experiment. To support this we
explored a model for the semantic description of a workflow-centric Research
Object (RO), where an RO is defined as a resource that aggregates other
resources, e.g., datasets, software, spreadsheets, text, etc. We applied this
model to a case study where we analysed human metabolite variation by
workflows.
