piperNet was (is?) an attempt to create a distributed workflow editor for bioinformatics work, it has a large degree of overlap with Visual Programming techniques, and visualising i/o porcesses in partiular http://bioinformatics.org/pipernet/

links

• http://www.biopipe.org/
• http://biomoby.org/

…in perl (see the o'reilly book)

…in LISP > http://www.biolisp.org/

related: Infoviz / BioComputing