Taverna: From Biology to Astronomy Dr Katy Wolstencroft University of Manchester my Grid OMII-UK

What is Taverna? An environment for workflow design and execution User interface to a larger suite of middleware – my Grid Designed to support in silico experiments in biology Open source

OMII Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute University of Manchester joined with the Universities of Edinburgh and Southampton in March 2006 OMII-UK aims to provide software and support to enable a sustained future for the UK e-Science community and its international collaborators. A guarantee of development and support

The Life Science Community In silico Biology is an open Community Open access to data Open access to resources Open access to tools Open access to applications Global in silico biological research

The Community Problems Everything is Distributed –Data, Resources and Scientists Heterogeneous data Very few standards –I/O formats, data representation, annotation –Everything is a string! Integration of data and interoperability of resources is difficult

NAR 2007 – 968 databases Lots of Resources

Traditional Bioinformatics acatttctac caacagtgga tgaggttgtt ggtctatgtt ctcaccaaat ttggtgttgt cagtctttta aattttaacc tttagagaag agtcatacag tcaatagcct tttttagctt gaccatccta atagatacac agtggtgtct cactgtgatt ttaatttgca ttttcctgct gactaattat gttgagcttg ttaccattta gacaacttca ttagagaagt gtctaatatt taggtgactt gcctgttttt ttttaattgg gatcttaatt tttttaaatt attgatttgt aggagctatt tatatattct ggatacaagt tctttatcag atacacagtt tgtgactatt ttcttataag tctgtggttt ttatattaat gtttttattg atgactgttt tttacaattg tggttaagta tacatgacat aaaacggatt atcttaacca ttttaaaatg taaaattcga tggcattaag tacatccaca atattgtgca actatcacca ctatcatact ccaaaagggc atccaatacc cattaagctg tcactcccca atctcccatt ttcccacccc tgacaatcaa taacccattt tctgtctcta tggatttgcc tgttctggat attcatatta atagaatcaa

Workflows as a Solution Describes what you want to do, not how you want to do it High level description of the experiment Easier to explain, share, relocate, reuse and repurpose. Workflow Model Workflow is the integrator of knowledge The METHODS section of a scientific publication

Taverna Workflow Components Scufl Simple Conceptual Unified Flow Language

Taverna in an Open World Open domain services and resources. Taverna accesses services Third party – we dont own them – we didnt build them All the major providers –NCBI, DDBJ, EBI … Enforce NO common data model. Quality Web Services considered desirable

What can you do with my Grid? ~33,000 downloads Users worldwide US, Singapore, UK, Europe, Australia Systems biology Proteomics Gene/protein annotation Microarray data analysis Medical image analysis Heart simulations High throughput screening Genotype/Phenotype studies Health Informatics Astronomy Chemoinformatics Data integration

Examples – Early Pioneers Williams-Beuren Syndrome CTA-315H11CTB- 51J22 ELN WBSCR14 RP11-622P13 RP11-148M21RP11-731K22 314,004bp extension All nine known genes identified (40/45 exons identified) CLDN4CLDN3 STX1A WBSCR18 WBSCR21 WBSCR22 WBSCR24 WBSCR27 WBSCR28 Four workflow cycles totalling ~ 10 hours The gap was correctly closed and all known features identified Identifying new human genome sequence and genes contained within in an area of the genome associated with the disease Improve understanding between genotype and phenotype

Trypanosomiasis in Africa Resistance to parasites in different breeds of cattle Involves: Microarray analysis Classical genetics Biochemical pathway analysis Large data sets, large results sets

Is Taverna Just for Biologists? Nothing in the code is specific to biology The default list of services ARE bio services, but Taverna doesnt care what they are Services from other science disciplines can simply be slotted in

Other Examples Medical imaging –MIAS-GRID –investigating cartilage thickness during drug trials –2D and 3D brain image registration Chemoinformatics –CDK-Taverna – project to provide the CDK chemoinformatics tool set as web services –Chimatica - Virtual Drug Candidate Production Environment Health informatics –PsyGrid – investigating first episode psychosis

Dilbert ##

What Taverna Gives you Automation Implicit iteration Implicit parallelisation Support for nested workflow construction Error handling –Retry, failover and automatic substitution of alternates

Extensibility Accepts many types of services: - web services, beanshell scripts, local java scripts, JDBC connections…etc Easy to add your own services Plug-in architecture Easy to build new processor types Easy to extend to include alternative results viewers

Could Taverna be used for Astronomy? Lots of data (although individual data items might be bigger) Distributed data Chains of analyses MORE standards for data formatting/exchange Investigated by AstroGrid and SAMPO

Sampo - European Southern Observatory project Workflows for data reduction Reasons for choosing Taverna Open source Free Allows customisation Easy to use and adapt Designed for science Most workflow engines are meant for business applications Very robust Actively developed Good support for web services

AstroGrid Workflows Evaluation of Taverna Building plug-ins for AstroGird project In the process of gathering AstroGrid requirements Still things to address……..

Coming soon…Taverna 2 A complete redesign of Taverna from the ground up to enable: Streaming data Management of large volumes of data Better remote workflow execution Integration with grid resources Monitoring and steering Beta release due end summer 2007

my Grid acknowledgements Carole Goble, Norman Paton, Robert Stevens, Anil Wipat, David De Roure, Steve Pettifer OMII-UK Tom Oinn, Katy Wolstencroft, Daniele Turi, June Finch, Stuart Owen, David Withers, Stian Soiland, Franck Tanoh, Matthew Gamble, Alan Williams Research Martin Szomszor, Duncan Hull, Jun Zhao, Pinar Alper, Antoon Goderis, Alastair Hampshire, Qiuwei Yu, Wang Kaixuan. Current contributors Matthew Pocock, James Marsh, Khalid Belhajjame, PsyGrid project, Bergen people, EMBRACE people. User Advocates and their bosses Simon Pearce, Claire Jennings, Hannah Tipney, May Tassabehji, Andy Brass, Paul Fisher, Peter Li, Simon Hubbard, Tracy Craddock, Doug Kell, Marco Roos, Matthew Pocock, Mark Wilkinson Past Contributors Matthew Addis, Nedim Alpdemir, Tim Carver, Rich Cawley, Neil Davis, Alvaro Fernandes, Justin Ferris, Robert Gaizaukaus, Kevin Glover, Chris Greenhalgh, Mark Greenwood, Yikun Guo, Ananth Krishna, Phillip Lord, Darren Marvin, Simon Miles, Luc Moreau, Arijit Mukherjee, Juri Papay, Savas Parastatidis, Milena Radenkovic, Stefan Rennick-Egglestone, Peter Rice, Martin Senger, Nick Sharman, Victor Tan, Paul Watson, and Chris Wroe. Industrial Dennis Quan, Sean Martin, Michael Niemi (IBM), Chimatica. Funding EPSRC, Wellcome Trust.