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myExperiment and Taverna – a great success at ISMB!

With more than two-thousand delegates, the International Conference of Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) is the world’s largest bioinformatics conference. The myGrid team, who are regular ISMB attendees, were involved in more activities at this conference than ever before.

A myExperiment presentation and a joint myExperiment-Taverna demo were both great successes. A preview of Taverna 2, which is currently in its beta phase, was also shown. The myGrid team were happy to find that numerous presentations featured Taverna and myExperiment. The myGrid stand was extremely popular with developers and delegates from various disciplines. Many delegates wanted to discover how Taverna and myExperiment could fit with their own research environments. This contact also allowed the team to collect feedback and new user requirements.

The ISMB conference provided an excellent opportunity for the myGrid team to communicate with their huge user base. It was also an invaluable opportunity for the team to build collaborations with several projects, such as GALAXY and PATHWAY.

Have your say!

Every six months, the three OMII-UK sites get together for a Face to Face meeting. The latest meeting might be the last of its kind, because it proved so successful that we’re inviting everyone to join in next time.

These meetings do not have a rigid agenda. Instead, we nominate topics for discussion and then vote for the topics that we think are most important. At the next meeting, we want to take this one step further by inviting our partners, developers and users. This could be your chance to directly influence the issues that OMII-UK will address.

News of the next Face to Face meeting will be announced on our website in the coming months.

New Software

The last few months have seen the release of many new OMII-UK software packages.

The Rapid tool for easy portlet development, described in the last newsletter, is now available. A reference installation for PAG, our videoconferencing software, is up and running. AVATS, which handles audio and video for videoconferencing, can be downloaded as part of PAG or Access Grid. The JSDL Applications Repository is now accessible. Our visualisation software, RAVE, can now be downloaded and GridSAM has been overhauled. Even more releases are planned for 2009.

www.tinyurl.com/5v4z7z

Award for Taverna-caBIG

The poster Orchestrating caGrid services in Taverna won an Outstanding Poster Award at the Biomedical Informatics without Borders Meeting in Bethesda, Maryland this September.

The meeting was sponsored by the Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG) and the UK National Cancer Research Institute (NCRI). Congratulations to Ravi Madduri, Wei Tan and all the caBig and Taverna teams!

www.tinyurl.com/65gukm

Summer of Code

OMII-UK participated in this year's Google Mentoring Summit at Google HQ following our participation in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2008.

Google believe in fostering a healthy open-source community. The Mentoring Summit provides a forum for open-source developers and advocates to exchange ideas and provide feedback on the GSoC Programme. Google do not pre-announce their programmes, but if GSoC 2009 goes ahead, we look forward to participating.

www.tinyurl.com/43ddpk

NCeSS call for papers

The fifth International Conference on e-Social Science will be held in Maternushaus, Cologne on 24-26 June 2009. The deadline for paper abstracts is 26 January 2009.

The conference brings together leading representatives of the social science, e-Infrastructure, cyberinfrastructure and e-Research communities. It is organised by the National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS—see page 7).

www.tinyurl.com/5d2t6c