Speaker
Dr
Carole Goble
(University of Manchester)
Description
The OMII-UK myGrid project (http://www.mygrid.org.uk) has developed the popular Taverna workflow workbench, used for a wide range of data-centric Life Science problems and increasing within other domains such as astronomy and music. Taverna was designed to suit the work-a-day bioinformatician in a normal (not especially well-resourced) research laboratory, in order to ease and automate the routine burden of plumbing together the myriad of data resources and analytical tools publicly available and privately developed. It has been widely adopted by over 200 projects and labs, with many thousands of everyday users, and stands at nearly 40,000 downloads (1,500 per month).
The Taverna Workflow Workbench is an open-source workflow tool which provides a data-centric workflow language (Scufl) and graphical interface to: facilitate the building of workflows over distributed services hosted on remote and local machines; run these workflows on their own data; and visualise the results. Workflows can be enacted as part of the workbench or from third party applications. The enactor and the workbench have been designed with a range of extensibility points to make them open. A suite of plug-ins and components provide: service ingest and management; the cataloguing and discovery of services and workflows using semantic descriptions; and the recording of the provenance of the data outcomes and the execution log of the workflow runs. Recent work has focused on better support for third party applications, including a Web browser workflow client that enables Taverna workflows to be launched from a web browser, and the publishing of workflows as Google gadgets.
Complementing Taverna, and capitalising on the increasing numbers of workflows and users, the myExperiment initiative
(http://myexperiment.org) is creating a social networking environment and workflow bazaar for workflow workers. This recognizes that workflows are scientific assets in their own right, to be exchanged, traded and reused.
The talk will introduce the Taverna Workbench and its associated suite of components, its current status and plans, some success stories and some possible exploitation plans and points of collaboration for EGEE.
In particular, the Taverna enactor is currently undergoing a major revision that will retain all the functionality of the current Taverna, but with better scalability, data streaming, data management, grid services integration and security management.
