Taverna Grimoires Integration

Google Summer of Code 2008 ideas

Mentors:
Stuart Owen stuzart at gmail.com
Alan R Williams alaninmcr at googlemail.com.

Background

Taverna is a free software tool for designing and executing workflows, created by the myGrid project. Taverna allows users to integrate many different software tools, including web services, such as those provided by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, The European Bioinformatics Institute, the DNA Databank of Japan (DDBJ), SoapLab, BioMOBY and EMBOSS.

A Grimoire is a magician's manual for invoking demons (Oxford English Dictionary). Likewise, the Grimoires registry hosts descriptions of services and workflows, which a scientist can use for forming their complex scientific experiments. However, service and workflow interfaces are sometimes underspecified and therefore difficult to use in an automated manner; hence, the myGrid registry augments their interfaces with metadata such as functionality, semantic information about their inputs and outputs, or various metrics (e.g. perceived quality of service, trust).

Project Goals

Taverna and Grimoires integration, using Grimoires as a UDDI registry to discover services using an alternative mechanism to Feta.

Project Requirements

Any student wishing to undertake this project should be proficient Java programmers. Prior knowledge of web services would be useful but not essential.