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Current Projects

The Taverna team are currently involved in or collaborating on several projects sponsoring the development of new tools and the improvement of Taverna:

  • SEEK – the SEEK platform is a web-based resource for sharing heterogeneous scientific research datasets, models or simulations, processes and research outcomes.
  • BioVeL – establishing an international e-Laboratory to allow biodiversity scientists to jointly tackle diverse research challenges using Taverna, myExperiment and BioCatalogue
  • Wf4Ever – providing methods and tools required to ensure the long-term preservation of scientific workflows
  • SCAPE – large scale and computation intense automated digital preservation and quality assurance workflows on a cloud infrastructure

Specific e-Science projects

We are also involved in various projects set out to solve particular e-Science problems using Taverna:

Outreach project

An outreach project is designed to expose scientists to the possible uses of e-Science and to aid them in adopting the available tools and techniques:

  • ENGAGE – JISC initiative for exploiting the benefits of e-Infrastructure by developing and deploying new software solutions on available UK e-Infrastructure; funded a development project to facilitate the use of Taverna for Shared Genomics

Previous projects

There are also a large number of Taverna-related projects that the team have been involved with in the past:

  • HELIO – the Heliophysics Integrated Observatory
  • TSB grant – to address NHS requirements for accessing and comparing large amounts of information and find common genetic links when testing new treatments (in partnership with Eagle Genomics)
  • Taverna-Galaxy – a tool for automatic generation and exposure of Taverna workflows as Galaxy tools. Galaxy is an open, web-based platform for data intensive biomedical research
  • e-LICO – a virtual laboratory for interdisciplinary collaborative workflows in data mining and data-intensive sciences
  • NeISS – Taverna workflows for social (population and traffic) simulations in portals
  • caGrid project – support for running cancer-research workflows
  • e-Fungi – Web services for comparative genomics
  • ISpider – proteomics workflows
  • MIASGrid – medical imaging

Project descriptions

BioVeL

The Biodiversity Virtual e‑Laboratory (BioVeL) project, led by the School of Computer Science and Informatics at Cardiff University, has €5 million in funding and is seeking to provide a vital service that will improve the way scientists share, analyse and present information in the growing area of biodiversity science. The project includes the application of Taverna, myExperiment and the BioCatalogue.

Biodiversity science is the study of plants and animals that inhabit our planet and the environments they live in. Amid growing concerns over the extinction rate of certain species as their natural habitats are increasingly destroyed, and with biodiversity becoming as important as climate change on the political agenda, this new research project could not be more timely.

Biodiversity Virtual e‑Laboratory (BioVeL) will establish an international e-Laboratory – the first of its kind in Europe – that will allow biodiversity scientists to jointly tackle diverse research challenges.

Experts from Cardiff University along with 15 partners from institutions across Europe, hope that when completed, the BioVeL e-Laboratory will, for the first time, give scientists access to multiple data, analysis and computing resources for biodiversity science through a robust e-Science infrastructure.

Ranked by the European Commission (EC) as top of its class from more than 60 proposals, BioVeL is funded under the EC’s FP7 e-Infrastructures programme to support the creation of the European Research Area.

For further information on the BioVeL project, visit http://www.biovel.eu/

SCAPE

SCAPE (SCAlable Preservation Environments) is an EU-funded FP7 project aimed at building a scalable platform for planning and execution of computation intensive processes for ingestion or migration of large data sets in order to help automate digital preservation.

The data sets involved are either heterogeneous data collections (collections of objects of different type), contain data objects that are themselves large or complex in structure or contain a huge amount of digital objects. The sheer volume of data archives makes it impossible to use the current service-oriented architectures to ensure access to digital information over time.

In this project, preservation processes will be realised as data pipelines and described formally as automated, quality-assured preservation Taverna workflows. The workflows will invoke various services for planning and execution of institutional preservation and quality assurance strategies. The workflows will be deployed on a large scale (using Hadoop MapReduce clouds) and executed over large, distributed and heterogeneous collections of complex digital objects.

The workflows will enable reproducibility of preservation processes and collect provenance data over the entire digital object’s lifecycle.

The execution of workflows will be controlled by a policy-based “planning and watch” system, which will ensure the workflows are in line with state-of-the art in digital object representation, file formats, rendering tools, etc. and detect and report any errors in a preservation process.

SCAPE and Taverna in use

by Schlarb Sven, sven.schlarb@onb.ac.at, Austrian National Library

SCAPE consists of testbeds that have three application areas: Digital Repositories, from the library community, Web Content, from the web archiving community, and Research Data Sets, from the scientific community. The testbeds are used to evaluate solutions developed by the SCAPE project against defined institutional data sets in order to validate their applicability to real life application scenarios, such as large scale data repository ingest-workflows or data archive maintenance.

Taverna is being used to develop concept workflows locally, to study the feasibility of differing approaches. Taverna server is used for remote execution of workflows, with the Tool service in use as the main integration pattern.

In the context of how Taverna technology is currently used from a research perspective it is being used as a tool for ETL (Extraction/Transform/Load) and creating query-able data tables from large digital object collections. Content analysis and quality assurance are also performed using Taverna.

Austrian National Library

Max Kaiser, Head of Department of Research and Development Bettina Kann, Head of Digital Library

ChemTaverna

ChemTaverna is a pilot project currently being undertaken to investigate the application of Taverna in cheminformatics by scientists at the School of Chemistry, University of Southampton in collaboration with developers at the Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre (MIB).

A range of cheminformatics services are available for use in the Taverna Workbench – their descriptions and example workflows showing how they can be used in data analyses are available on-line. All cheminformatics services can be imported to the Workbench in one go in the form of the Chemistry Service Set , which is available from myExperiment as a Service Set Pack.

The results from cheminformatics workflows will be shared by means of blogs to provide a notebook record of data analyses. The ChemTaverna project will also investigate how laboratory instrumentation can be controlled in workflows for use in closed-loop optimization experiments to enhance the performance of analytical instruments.

UsefulChem project, an Open Notebook Science project in chemistry led by the Bradley Laboratory at Drexel University, have created many useful chemistry workflows using Taverna. The workflows are described at Jean-Claude Bradley’s UsefulChem blog.

ONDEX

ONDEX is currently an opensource suite of software that “enables data from diverse biological data sets to be linked, integrated and visualised”. This BBSRC funded project aims to support ONDEX and its integration with more general bioinformatics tools, such as those developed by the myGrid team.

The existing ONDEX functionality is being exposed as Web services. These may then be used in workflow systems such as Taverna. Taverna workflows are also used to increase the functionality of ONDEX.

The partners are the University of Manchester (Carole Goble and Robert Stevens), University of Newcastle (Anil Wipat), Rothamsted Research (C Rawlings), the National Centre for Text Mining and Manchester Centre of Integrative Systems Biology. The project runs from April 2008 to March 2011.

Shared Genomics

Shared Genomics project, in partnership with Microsoft, aims to develop accessible High Power Computing infrastructure to support the analysis of large genetic data. An essential part of the work is the integration of results with metadata retrieved from knowledge repositories. This work will build upon the myGrid achievements in the association of metadata with data and the description of the semantics of services.

The project is based at the North West Institute for BioHealth Informatics (NIBHI), a collaborative venture between the major universities in the North West of England, industrial partners such as Astra Zeneca, and the North West Development Agency. The principal investigator is Iain Buchan. The project is funded for £600k and runs from March 2008 to February 2010. Enable Taverna workflows in a Shared Genomics causality workbench

This is an ENGAGE-funded project to enable Taverna workflows using Shared Genomics services to be called in a more efficient manner. This work builds on the Taverna Server.

REFINE

REFINE, Tools for the text-mining-based visualisation of the provenance of biochemical networks, is a BBSRC funded project to find solutions for the terminology problem in systems biology, by developing techniques for recognising synonym terms.

The REFINE project involves the use of text-mining tools. Their application will be influenced by the experience of the myGrid team and Taverna Workbench users in this area.

The principal investigator is Sophia Ananiadou, Director of the National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM) at the University of Manchester. The project runs from January 2007 to June 2010.

HELIO

HELIO, the Heliophysics Integrated Observatory, is a three year EU funded project that started in June 2009.

The Heliophysics Integrated Observatory, HELIO, will deploy a distributed network of services that will address the needs of a broad community of researchers in heliophysics. HELIO will provide the most comprehensive integrated information system in this domain; it will coordinate access to the resources needed by the community, and will provide access to services to mine and analyse the data. HELIO Project Information

The project partners include institutions from France, Ireland, Italy, Switzerland, the UK and the USA.

Publications

Workflows for Heliophysics, Blanc, A., Brooke, J., Fellows, D., Soldati, M., Pérez-Suárez, D., Marassi, A., Santin, A., Journal of Grid Computing. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10723-013-9256-5

ENGAGE

The ENGage Academic Groups with E-infrastructure (ENGAGE) project is a JISC funded initiative involving the National Grid Service (NGS) and the Universities of Southampton, Manchester and Edinburgh.

“The overall aim of the project is to improve the experience of research users of UK e-Infrastructure, and promote the use of UK e-Infrastructure to a wider set of users by engaging with different research communities.”

The principal investigator is David De Roure.

ENGAGE funded a development project to facilitate the use of Taverna for Shared Genomics.mGrid, ENGAGE

TSB grant

This £500,000 project is part-funded by the UK’s national innovation agency, the Technology Strategy Board (TSB) and is carried out by Eagle Genomics, a leading open-source bioinformatics service provider, in collaboration with the myGrid/Taverna team and Cytocell Ltd., with assistance from NGRL, based at the Central Manchester University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, and the NIHR Manchester Biomedical Research Centre.

The project will build upon the success of the Taverna Workflow Management System in next generation sequencing to enable medical researchers who are developing and testing new treatments to compare large amounts of information analysed and stored on a cloud and find common genetic links.

The technology will also help clinicians to look at an individual patient’s genetic make-up to aid diagnosis and ongoing treatment.

Rather than simply testing a patient for one suspected condition, using the cloud technology could allow clinicians to test for a much wider range of complaints.

Currently, the NHS IT systems do not have the resources to cope with the huge demands required. The cloud system can be accessed from a separate site, away from hospitals, freeing up space.

Eagle Genomics will work with the Taverna team to adapt Taverna to allow non-IT experts to easily add and extract information and share it with their colleagues.

Read mode about the project.

Taverna 2-Galaxy

Galaxy is an open, Web-based platform for data intensive biomedical research. Taverna 2-Galaxy integration is a first step towards making Galaxy and Taverna 2 more interoperable. It allows the automatic generation of Galaxy tools from Taverna 2 workflows. The tools can then be installed as usual in a Galaxy server and allow the Taverna workflows to become part of a Galaxy pipeline. It has been developed by Kostas Karasavvas of NBIC.

Users do not need to install Taverna 2-Galaxy themselves. It is available as part of the myExperiment Web site. While browsing Taverna 2 workflows the user will see an additional link “Download as Galaxy Tool” in the download section of the workflow. The tool can then be installed into Galaxy in the usual manner by the Galaxy administrator. They will also need a Taverna Server that will run the Taverna 2-Galaxy tools.

Also check out the Taverna-Galaxy wiki. For Taverna-Galaxy users

  • You can now include Taverna workflows as part of your Galaxy workflows
  • The Taverna workflow will be made available as a Galaxy tool
  • You can search/browse Taverna workflows from the myExperiment workflow repository, and
  • Just let your Galaxy administrator know which Taverna workflows you want installed in Galaxy

Try it out

The NBIC Galaxy Server provides a demo platform to run some pre-installed Taverna workflows in Galaxy

Taverna-Galaxy in use

Dr Casey Bergman and his group of Life Sciences researchers from the Bergman Lab @ University of Manchester working on eukaryotic genome biology have successfully installed and used the integrated Taverna-Galaxy tools.

See their blog about their experiences in installing and running Taverna-Galaxy.

e-LICO

The goal of the e-LICO project is to build a virtual laboratory for interdisciplinary collaborative research in data mining and data-intensive sciences. The proposed e-lab will comprise three layers: the e-science and data mining layers will form a generic research environment that can be adapted to different scientific domains by customizing the application layer.

The foundation of the e-science layer is a suite of open source components from the myGrid e-science platform (one of which is the next generation Taverna Workbench). To build the e-LICO infrastructure, these components will be extended with tools for content creation (e.g. semantic annotation, ontology engineering), as well as mechanisms for multiple levels and modes of collaboration in experimental research.

A video tutorial explains how to build data-mining workflows.

NeISS

The National e-Infrastructure for Social Simulation is a JISC-funded project to undertake a coordinated programme of producing services and furthering uptake through community engagement to create a sustainable, long-term platform for social simulation with potential for major strategic impact, both in the UK and internationally. The project involves Leeds University, Manchester University (including NCeSS), Stirling University, Glasgow University, UCL, Southampton University, STFC Daresbury Laboratory.

Within the project, the Taverna team are working on:

  • the integration of the Taverna functionality into a portal, i.e. providing JSR 168/286 compliant components that provide access to enactment, management, monitoring and creation of workflows.
  • the re-purposing of services from myExperiment, facilitating their integration into a portal. An important focus will be the incorporation of social networking functionality to provide extended archiving and documentation capability for social simulations.

Documentation on wrapping Taverna workflows in a portal and the code is available from our (Pre-Apache) wiki.

caGrid

caGrid is part of caBIG (cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid), a US project to carry out eScience and bioinformatics in cancer research.

The Taverna team were funded by the US National Cancer Institute (NCI) to help integrate Taverna with caGrid, so that Taverna can find and use (secured and non-secured) caBIG data and analytical services found on caGrid.

The team wrapped a selection of typical non-caBIG services used by Taverna users so that they are annotated and comply with caBIG’s Silver-level compatibility requirements.

The team also implemented a plugin for Taverna 2.1.2 that enables semantic search for caGrid services described by the caGrid’s Index Service and adding them as component to workflows.

More details about the project and the deliverables can be found on the project’s Wiki pages and NCI’s Gforge project pages. Source code of the Taverna plugins is available from the SVN repository. The project ran from September 2008 to November 2009.

The work on the caGrid project follows on from caGrid’s previous adoption of Taverna when the Taverna and caGrid collaborated in 2007 to develop a Taverna 1.7.0 GT4 processor as a plugin based upon the Taverna’s WSDL processor. This work has been updated for Taverna 2.x and there are two plugins available: caGrid plugin (for invoking caGrid services) and caGrid remote execution plugin (for remote execution of caGrid workflows on a server).

The functionality of the Taverna 1.7.0 caGrid plugin was shown at a caGrid meeting in late 2008 where the associated poster won an outstanding poster award.

The installation and use of the Taverna 1.7.0 caGrid plugin is described on the caGrid wiki.

caGrid Publications

The paper “Combining the Power of Taverna and caGrid: Scientific Workflows that Enable Web-Scale Collaboration” has been written by Wei Tan, Ian Foster and Ravi Madduri to describe some of the work done on the project.

e-Fungi

e-Fungi was a BBSRC funded project to produce an e-Science infrastructure for comparative functional genomics in fungal species. Parts of the e-Fungi project include the development of a data warehouse and analysis libraries that are exposed as Web services. These Web services can be used within the Taverna Workbench for the creation of workflows.

The principal investigators were Professor Norman Paton, Professor Oliver, Dr Rattray and Dr Hubbard of the University of Manchester. The project ran from October 2004 to June 2008.

iSpider

iSpider was a BBSRC funded project to create an informatics platform for proteomics using Grid-based technologies, and to use this to address specific biological problems. The grantholders were Dr S. Hubbard, Dr Suzanne Embury, Professor Carole Goble CBE, Professor Norman Paton, Dr Robert Stevens and Prof Oliver of the University of Manchester. The project ran from July 2004 to June 2007.

The iSpider project developed three tools that make use of Taverna’s functionality and plugability to support the development of workflows, in particular for proteomics.

Much of the work has been done by Khalid Belhajjame and additional information can be found in his publications. A tool for the identification and the characterisation of mismatches in scientific workflows

By using the Feta service registry and extending the capabilities of the Taverna Workbench, this tool provides a means for automatically identifying and characterising the mismatches that may arise between the constituent operations of an in silico experiments. A tool for automatically inferring service annotations

This tool allows the derivation, in an automatic fashion, of information about the annotations of service parameters using existing tested-and-tried workflows. It has been evaluated using the workflow repository provided by myExperiment together with the myGrid ontology. A system for querying multiple proteomics data sources

It supports the combined use of Grid data access (OGSA-DAI), Grid distributed querying (OGSA-DQP) and data integration (AutoMed) software tools to support distributed data analysis. This system has been used for providing an integrated access to four proteomics data sources, namely, gpmDB, PedroDB, PepSeeker and Pride.

MIASGrid

The MIAS project examined the requirements of Medical Imaging and Signals. The MIASGrid sub-project, took examples of those requirements and investigated how e-Science and the myGrid tools in particular could satisfy them. The project was funded by the EPSRC for £494k and ran until April 2006.

The project produced several workflows that demonstrated the applicability of Taverna to the handling of large amounts of medical image data. The workflows made use of MATLAB and also interaction with users.

The workflows covered two domains:

Current Projects

The Taverna team are currently involved in or collaborating on several projects sponsoring the development of new tools and the improvement of Taverna:

  • SEEK – the SEEK platform is a web-based resource for sharing heterogeneous scientific research datasets, models or simulations, processes and research outcomes.
  • BioVeL – establishing an international e-Laboratory to allow biodiversity scientists to jointly tackle diverse research challenges using Taverna, myExperiment and BioCatalogue
  • Wf4Ever – providing methods and tools required to ensure the long-term preservation of scientific workflows
  • SCAPE – large scale and computation intense automated digital preservation and quality assurance workflows on a cloud infrastructure

Specific e-Science projects

We are also involved in various projects set out to solve particular e-Science problems using Taverna:

Outreach project

An outreach project is designed to expose scientists to the possible uses of e-Science and to aid them in adopting the available tools and techniques:

  • ENGAGE – JISC initiative for exploiting the benefits of e-Infrastructure by developing and deploying new software solutions on available UK e-Infrastructure; funded a development project to facilitate the use of Taverna for Shared Genomics

Previous projects

There are also a large number of Taverna-related projects that the team have been involved with in the past:

  • HELIO – the Heliophysics Integrated Observatory
  • TSB grant – to address NHS requirements for accessing and comparing large amounts of information and find common genetic links when testing new treatments (in partnership with Eagle Genomics)
  • Taverna-Galaxy – a tool for automatic generation and exposure of Taverna workflows as Galaxy tools. Galaxy is an open, web-based platform for data intensive biomedical research
  • e-LICO – a virtual laboratory for interdisciplinary collaborative workflows in data mining and data-intensive sciences
  • NeISS – Taverna workflows for social (population and traffic) simulations in portals
  • caGrid project – support for running cancer-research workflows
  • e-Fungi – Web services for comparative genomics
  • ISpider – proteomics workflows
  • MIASGrid – medical imaging

Project descriptions

BioVeL

The Biodiversity Virtual e‑Laboratory (BioVeL) project, led by the School of Computer Science and Informatics at Cardiff University, has €5 million in funding and is seeking to provide a vital service that will improve the way scientists share, analyse and present information in the growing area of biodiversity science. The project includes the application of Taverna, myExperiment and the BioCatalogue.

Biodiversity science is the study of plants and animals that inhabit our planet and the environments they live in. Amid growing concerns over the extinction rate of certain species as their natural habitats are increasingly destroyed, and with biodiversity becoming as important as climate change on the political agenda, this new research project could not be more timely.

Biodiversity Virtual e‑Laboratory (BioVeL) will establish an international e-Laboratory – the first of its kind in Europe – that will allow biodiversity scientists to jointly tackle diverse research challenges.

Experts from Cardiff University along with 15 partners from institutions across Europe, hope that when completed, the BioVeL e-Laboratory will, for the first time, give scientists access to multiple data, analysis and computing resources for biodiversity science through a robust e-Science infrastructure.

Ranked by the European Commission (EC) as top of its class from more than 60 proposals, BioVeL is funded under the EC’s FP7 e-Infrastructures programme to support the creation of the European Research Area.

For further information on the BioVeL project, visit http://www.biovel.eu/

SCAPE

SCAPE (SCAlable Preservation Environments) is an EU-funded FP7 project aimed at building a scalable platform for planning and execution of computation intensive processes for ingestion or migration of large data sets in order to help automate digital preservation.

The data sets involved are either heterogeneous data collections (collections of objects of different type), contain data objects that are themselves large or complex in structure or contain a huge amount of digital objects. The sheer volume of data archives makes it impossible to use the current service-oriented architectures to ensure access to digital information over time.

In this project, preservation processes will be realised as data pipelines and described formally as automated, quality-assured preservation Taverna workflows. The workflows will invoke various services for planning and execution of institutional preservation and quality assurance strategies. The workflows will be deployed on a large scale (using Hadoop MapReduce clouds) and executed over large, distributed and heterogeneous collections of complex digital objects.

The workflows will enable reproducibility of preservation processes and collect provenance data over the entire digital object’s lifecycle.

The execution of workflows will be controlled by a policy-based “planning and watch” system, which will ensure the workflows are in line with state-of-the art in digital object representation, file formats, rendering tools, etc. and detect and report any errors in a preservation process.

SCAPE and Taverna in use

by Schlarb Sven, sven.schlarb@onb.ac.at, Austrian National Library

SCAPE consists of testbeds that have three application areas: Digital Repositories, from the library community, Web Content, from the web archiving community, and Research Data Sets, from the scientific community. The testbeds are used to evaluate solutions developed by the SCAPE project against defined institutional data sets in order to validate their applicability to real life application scenarios, such as large scale data repository ingest-workflows or data archive maintenance.

Taverna is being used to develop concept workflows locally, to study the feasibility of differing approaches. Taverna server is used for remote execution of workflows, with the Tool service in use as the main integration pattern.

In the context of how Taverna technology is currently used from a research perspective it is being used as a tool for ETL (Extraction/Transform/Load) and creating query-able data tables from large digital object collections. Content analysis and quality assurance are also performed using Taverna.

Austrian National Library

Max Kaiser, Head of Department of Research and Development Bettina Kann, Head of Digital Library

ChemTaverna

ChemTaverna is a pilot project currently being undertaken to investigate the application of Taverna in cheminformatics by scientists at the School of Chemistry, University of Southampton in collaboration with developers at the Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre (MIB).

A range of cheminformatics services are available for use in the Taverna Workbench – their descriptions and example workflows showing how they can be used in data analyses are available on-line. All cheminformatics services can be imported to the Workbench in one go in the form of the Chemistry Service Set , which is available from myExperiment as a Service Set Pack.

The results from cheminformatics workflows will be shared by means of blogs to provide a notebook record of data analyses. The ChemTaverna project will also investigate how laboratory instrumentation can be controlled in workflows for use in closed-loop optimization experiments to enhance the performance of analytical instruments.

UsefulChem project, an Open Notebook Science project in chemistry led by the Bradley Laboratory at Drexel University, have created many useful chemistry workflows using Taverna. The workflows are described at Jean-Claude Bradley’s UsefulChem blog.

ONDEX

ONDEX is currently an opensource suite of software that “enables data from diverse biological data sets to be linked, integrated and visualised”. This BBSRC funded project aims to support ONDEX and its integration with more general bioinformatics tools, such as those developed by the myGrid team.

The existing ONDEX functionality is being exposed as Web services. These may then be used in workflow systems such as Taverna. Taverna workflows are also used to increase the functionality of ONDEX.

The partners are the University of Manchester (Carole Goble and Robert Stevens), University of Newcastle (Anil Wipat), Rothamsted Research (C Rawlings), the National Centre for Text Mining and Manchester Centre of Integrative Systems Biology. The project runs from April 2008 to March 2011.

Shared Genomics

Shared Genomics project, in partnership with Microsoft, aims to develop accessible High Power Computing infrastructure to support the analysis of large genetic data. An essential part of the work is the integration of results with metadata retrieved from knowledge repositories. This work will build upon the myGrid achievements in the association of metadata with data and the description of the semantics of services.

The project is based at the North West Institute for BioHealth Informatics (NIBHI), a collaborative venture between the major universities in the North West of England, industrial partners such as Astra Zeneca, and the North West Development Agency. The principal investigator is Iain Buchan. The project is funded for £600k and runs from March 2008 to February 2010. Enable Taverna workflows in a Shared Genomics causality workbench

This is an ENGAGE-funded project to enable Taverna workflows using Shared Genomics services to be called in a more efficient manner. This work builds on the Taverna Server.

REFINE

REFINE, Tools for the text-mining-based visualisation of the provenance of biochemical networks, is a BBSRC funded project to find solutions for the terminology problem in systems biology, by developing techniques for recognising synonym terms.

The REFINE project involves the use of text-mining tools. Their application will be influenced by the experience of the myGrid team and Taverna Workbench users in this area.

The principal investigator is Sophia Ananiadou, Director of the National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM) at the University of Manchester. The project runs from January 2007 to June 2010.

HELIO

HELIO, the Heliophysics Integrated Observatory, is a three year EU funded project that started in June 2009.

The Heliophysics Integrated Observatory, HELIO, will deploy a distributed network of services that will address the needs of a broad community of researchers in heliophysics. HELIO will provide the most comprehensive integrated information system in this domain; it will coordinate access to the resources needed by the community, and will provide access to services to mine and analyse the data. HELIO Project Information

The project partners include institutions from France, Ireland, Italy, Switzerland, the UK and the USA.

Publications

Workflows for Heliophysics, Blanc, A., Brooke, J., Fellows, D., Soldati, M., Pérez-Suárez, D., Marassi, A., Santin, A., Journal of Grid Computing. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10723-013-9256-5

ENGAGE

The ENGage Academic Groups with E-infrastructure (ENGAGE) project is a JISC funded initiative involving the National Grid Service (NGS) and the Universities of Southampton, Manchester and Edinburgh.

“The overall aim of the project is to improve the experience of research users of UK e-Infrastructure, and promote the use of UK e-Infrastructure to a wider set of users by engaging with different research communities.”

The principal investigator is David De Roure.

ENGAGE funded a development project to facilitate the use of Taverna for Shared Genomics.mGrid, ENGAGE

TSB grant

This £500,000 project is part-funded by the UK’s national innovation agency, the Technology Strategy Board (TSB) and is carried out by Eagle Genomics, a leading open-source bioinformatics service provider, in collaboration with the myGrid/Taverna team and Cytocell Ltd., with assistance from NGRL, based at the Central Manchester University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, and the NIHR Manchester Biomedical Research Centre.

The project will build upon the success of the Taverna Workflow Management System in next generation sequencing to enable medical researchers who are developing and testing new treatments to compare large amounts of information analysed and stored on a cloud and find common genetic links.

The technology will also help clinicians to look at an individual patient’s genetic make-up to aid diagnosis and ongoing treatment.

Rather than simply testing a patient for one suspected condition, using the cloud technology could allow clinicians to test for a much wider range of complaints.

Currently, the NHS IT systems do not have the resources to cope with the huge demands required. The cloud system can be accessed from a separate site, away from hospitals, freeing up space.

Eagle Genomics will work with the Taverna team to adapt Taverna to allow non-IT experts to easily add and extract information and share it with their colleagues.

Read mode about the project.

Taverna 2-Galaxy

Galaxy is an open, Web-based platform for data intensive biomedical research. Taverna 2-Galaxy integration is a first step towards making Galaxy and Taverna 2 more interoperable. It allows the automatic generation of Galaxy tools from Taverna 2 workflows. The tools can then be installed as usual in a Galaxy server and allow the Taverna workflows to become part of a Galaxy pipeline. It has been developed by Kostas Karasavvas of NBIC.

Users do not need to install Taverna 2-Galaxy themselves. It is available as part of the myExperiment Web site. While browsing Taverna 2 workflows the user will see an additional link “Download as Galaxy Tool” in the download section of the workflow. The tool can then be installed into Galaxy in the usual manner by the Galaxy administrator. They will also need a Taverna Server that will run the Taverna 2-Galaxy tools.

Also check out the Taverna-Galaxy wiki. For Taverna-Galaxy users

  • You can now include Taverna workflows as part of your Galaxy workflows
  • The Taverna workflow will be made available as a Galaxy tool
  • You can search/browse Taverna workflows from the myExperiment workflow repository, and
  • Just let your Galaxy administrator know which Taverna workflows you want installed in Galaxy

Try it out

  The [NBIC Galaxy Server][65] provides a demo platform to run some pre-installed Taverna workflows in Galaxy

Taverna-Galaxy in use

Dr Casey Bergman and his group of Life Sciences researchers from the Bergman Lab @ University of Manchester working on eukaryotic genome biology have successfully installed and used the integrated Taverna-Galaxy tools.

See their blog about their experiences in installing and running Taverna-Galaxy.

e-LICO

The goal of the e-LICO project is to build a virtual laboratory for interdisciplinary collaborative research in data mining and data-intensive sciences. The proposed e-lab will comprise three layers: the e-science and data mining layers will form a generic research environment that can be adapted to different scientific domains by customizing the application layer.

The foundation of the e-science layer is a suite of open source components from the myGrid e-science platform (one of which is the next generation Taverna Workbench). To build the e-LICO infrastructure, these components will be extended with tools for content creation (e.g. semantic annotation, ontology engineering), as well as mechanisms for multiple levels and modes of collaboration in experimental research.

A video tutorial explains how to build data-mining workflows.

NeISS

The National e-Infrastructure for Social Simulation is a JISC-funded project to undertake a coordinated programme of producing services and furthering uptake through community engagement to create a sustainable, long-term platform for social simulation with potential for major strategic impact, both in the UK and internationally. The project involves Leeds University, Manchester University (including NCeSS), Stirling University, Glasgow University, UCL, Southampton University, STFC Daresbury Laboratory.

Within the project, the Taverna team are working on:

  • the integration of the Taverna functionality into a portal, i.e. providing JSR 168/286 compliant components that provide access to enactment, management, monitoring and creation of workflows.
  • the re-purposing of services from myExperiment, facilitating their integration into a portal. An important focus will be the incorporation of social networking functionality to provide extended archiving and documentation capability for social simulations.

Documentation on wrapping Taverna workflows in a portal and the code is available from our (Pre-Apache) wiki.

caGrid

caGrid is part of caBIG (cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid), a US project to carry out eScience and bioinformatics in cancer research.

The Taverna team were funded by the US National Cancer Institute (NCI) to help integrate Taverna with caGrid, so that Taverna can find and use (secured and non-secured) caBIG data and analytical services found on caGrid.

The team wrapped a selection of typical non-caBIG services used by Taverna users so that they are annotated and comply with caBIG’s Silver-level compatibility requirements.

The team also implemented a plugin for Taverna 2.1.2 that enables semantic search for caGrid services described by the caGrid’s Index Service and adding them as component to workflows.

More details about the project and the deliverables can be found on the project’s Wiki pages and NCI’s Gforge project pages. Source code of the Taverna plugins is available from the SVN repository. The project ran from September 2008 to November 2009.

The work on the caGrid project follows on from caGrid’s previous adoption of Taverna when the Taverna and caGrid collaborated in 2007 to develop a Taverna 1.7.0 GT4 processor as a plugin based upon the Taverna’s WSDL processor. This work has been updated for Taverna 2.x and there are two plugins available: caGrid plugin (for invoking caGrid services) and caGrid remote execution plugin (for remote execution of caGrid workflows on a server).

The functionality of the Taverna 1.7.0 caGrid plugin was shown at a caGrid meeting in late 2008 where the associated poster won an outstanding poster award.

The installation and use of the Taverna 1.7.0 caGrid plugin is described on the caGrid wiki.

caGrid Publications

The paper “Combining the Power of Taverna and caGrid: Scientific Workflows that Enable Web-Scale Collaboration” has been written by Wei Tan, Ian Foster and Ravi Madduri to describe some of the work done on the project.

e-Fungi

e-Fungi was a BBSRC funded project to produce an e-Science infrastructure for comparative functional genomics in fungal species. Parts of the e-Fungi project include the development of a data warehouse and analysis libraries that are exposed as Web services. These Web services can be used within the Taverna Workbench for the creation of workflows.

The principal investigators were Professor Norman Paton, Professor Oliver, Dr Rattray and Dr Hubbard of the University of Manchester. The project ran from October 2004 to June 2008.

iSpider

iSpider was a BBSRC funded project to create an informatics platform for proteomics using Grid-based technologies, and to use this to address specific biological problems. The grantholders were Dr S. Hubbard, Dr Suzanne Embury, Professor Carole Goble CBE, Professor Norman Paton, Dr Robert Stevens and Prof Oliver of the University of Manchester. The project ran from July 2004 to June 2007.

The iSpider project developed three tools that make use of Taverna’s functionality and plugability to support the development of workflows, in particular for proteomics.

Much of the work has been done by Khalid Belhajjame and additional information can be found in his publications. A tool for the identification and the characterisation of mismatches in scientific workflows

By using the Feta service registry and extending the capabilities of the Taverna Workbench, this tool provides a means for automatically identifying and characterising the mismatches that may arise between the constituent operations of an in silico experiments. A tool for automatically inferring service annotations

This tool allows the derivation, in an automatic fashion, of information about the annotations of service parameters using existing tested-and-tried workflows. It has been evaluated using the workflow repository provided by myExperiment together with the myGrid ontology. A system for querying multiple proteomics data sources

It supports the combined use of Grid data access (OGSA-DAI), Grid distributed querying (OGSA-DQP) and data integration (AutoMed) software tools to support distributed data analysis. This system has been used for providing an integrated access to four proteomics data sources, namely, gpmDB, PedroDB, PepSeeker and Pride.

MIASGrid

The MIAS project examined the requirements of Medical Imaging and Signals. The MIASGrid sub-project, took examples of those requirements and investigated how e-Science and the myGrid tools in particular could satisfy them. The project was funded by the EPSRC for £494k and ran until April 2006.

The project produced several workflows that demonstrated the applicability of Taverna to the handling of large amounts of medical image data. The workflows made use of MATLAB and also interaction with users.

The workflows covered two domains:

[1]: #biovel
[2]: http://www.wf4ever-project.org/home
[3]: #scape
[4]: #ChemTaverna
[5]: #ondex
[6]: #shared-genomics
[8]: #refine
[9]: #helio
[10]: #engage
[11]: #shared-genomics
[12]: #helio
[13]: #tsb
[14]: #taverna-galaxy
[15]: #e-lico
[16]: #neiss
[17]: #cagrid
[18]: #e-fungi
[19]: #ispider
[20]: #miasgrid
[21]: http://www.myexperiment.org/
[22]: http://www.biocatalogue.org/
[23]: http://www.biovel.eu/
[24]: http://www.scape-project.eu/
[25]: http://www.mib.ac.uk/
[26]: /introduction/chemistry-web-services
[27]: http://www.myexperiment.org/packs/135.html
[28]: http://usefulchem.wikispaces.com/
[29]: http://usefulchem.blogspot.com/
[30]: http://www.ondex.org/
[31]: http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/
[32]: http://www.manchester.ac.uk/
[33]: https://sites.google.com/site/carolegoble/
[34]: http://www.ncl.ac.uk/
[35]: http://www.rothamsted.ac.uk/
[36]: http://www.nactem.ac.uk/
[37]: http://www.mcisb.org/
[38]: http://www.nactem.ac.uk/pathtext/
[40]: http://www.nactem.ac.uk/staff/sophia.ananiadou/
[41]: http://www.nactem.ac.uk/
[42]: http://www.manchester.ac.uk/
[43]: http://www.helio-vo.eu/
[44]: http://www.helio-vo.eu/aboutus/helio_consortium.php
[45]: http://link.springer.com/journal/10723
[46]: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10723-013-9256-5
[47]: http://www.engage.ac.uk/
[48]: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/
[49]: http://www.ngs.ac.uk/
[50]: http://www.soton.ac.uk/
[51]: http://www.manchester.ac.uk/
[52]: http://www.edinburgh.ac.uk/
[53]: #shared-genomics
[54]: http://www.eaglegenomics.com/
[55]: http://www.ngrl.org.uk/
[56]: http://www.manchesterbrc.org/index.php
[57]: http://www.eaglegenomics.com/genetics-cloud-to-create-new-opportunities-for-researchers-and-clinicians
[58]: http://galaxy.psu.edu/
[59]: http://www.nbic.nl/
[60]: http://www.myexperiment.org/
[61]: /documentation/server
[62]: https://trac.nbic.nl/elabfactory/wiki/eGalaxy
[63]: http://www.myexperiment.org/workflows
[64]: http://www.myexperiment.org/
[65]: http://galaxy.nbic.nl/
[66]: http://bergmanlab.smith.man.ac.uk/
[67]: http://bergmanlab.smith.man.ac.uk/?p=943
[68]: http://www.e-lico.eu/
[69]: http://www.vimeo.com/10345778
[70]: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/
[71]: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/
[72]: http://www.manchester.ac.uk/
[74]: http://www.stir.ac.uk/
[75]: http://www.myexperiment.org/
[76]: http://www.mygrid.org.uk/dev/wiki/display/portals/NeISS+Project
[77]: http://www.cagrid.org/
[78]: http://cabig.cancer.gov/
[79]: http://www.mygrid.org.uk/dev/wiki/display/caGrid/Home
[80]: https://gforge.nci.nih.gov/svnroot/taverna-cagrid/
[81]: http://www.taverna.org.uk/documentation/taverna-plugins/taverna-2-x-plugins#cagrid_plugin
[82]: http://www.taverna.org.uk/documentation/taverna-plugins/taverna-2-x-plugins#cagrid_remote_execution_plugin
[83]: http://www.mygrid.org.uk/2008/09/outstanding-poster-award-at-the-cabig-ncri-conference/
[84]: http://cagrid.org/display/knowledgebase/How+to+Create+CaGrid+Workflow+Using+Taverna
[85]: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MIC.2008.120
[86]: http://www.ispider.manchester.ac.uk/
[87]: http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/
[88]: https://sites.google.com/site/carolegoble/
[89]: http://www.manchester.ac.uk/
[90]: http://www.mygrid.org.uk/tools/service-management/feta/
[91]: http://www.myexperiment.org/
[92]: http://www.mygrid.org.uk/tools/service-management/mygrid-ontology/
[93]: http://www.ogsadai.org.uk/
[94]: http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-540-24741-8_58
[95]: http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/automed/
[96]: http://gpmdb.thegpm.org/
[97]: http://pedro.cs.manchester.ac.uk/
[98]: http://www.ebi.ac.uk/pride/
[99]: http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~irc/grid_mias-grid.html
[100]: http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/
[101]: http://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab/
[102]: https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/uk-ac-man-scw:1d33210
[103]: http://www.seek4science.org/
[104]: http://helio-dev.cs.technik.fhnw.ch/heliovo/project-info.html
[105]: http://www.mygrid.org.uk/projects/engage/