The Taverna team are pleased to announce the release of the Taverna 2.5.0 Workbench and Command Line Tool.

Taverna 2.5.0 includes additional functionality (interaction service, PROV support, components), a simplified installation, user interface improvements and bug-fixes.

Simplified Installation

To simplify installation on common operating systems, Taverna distributions now come bundled with the Java Runtime Environment from OpenJDK and, in the case of the Workbench, the required Graphviz binaries. The installation no longer requires you to install the JCE Strong Encryption policy.

Domain-specific versions

Taverna Workbench and Command Line Tool are now available in domain-specific versions for Astronomy, Biodiversity, Bioinformatics and Digital Preservation.  Domain-specific editions add support for specific service types and come pre-populated with lists of available services and example workflows that are specifically tailored for a given domain.

The Core edition contains a Taverna Workbench suitable for building scientific workflows in any domain, accessing general services such as REST or SOAP Web services and command line tools.

Enterprise Taverna is equivalent to the Core edition with BioMart,BioMoby, SoapLab, API Consumer, Service Catalogue and WebDAV installed.

Interaction service

The Interaction Service has been added to the Workbench. This provides the ability to ask questions and tell information users during the running of the workflow. Unlike the previous interactive local workers, this service uses web pages, and therefore also works when running workflows on a Taverna Server via Taverna Player.

Component service

The Component capability has been added. This allows the usage of component services, which encapsulate a nested Taverna workflow that has been constructed and described for compatiblity with other components within a chosen Component Family.

This allows for publication of reusable and shareable workflow fragments, which appear as single services within the master workflow.

Provenance

Support for exporting Taverna-PROV provenance format has been added. This adds a new button “Save Provenance Bundle” when clicking “Save All” from the results perspective.

The provenance bundle is a ZIP file containing all input, output and intermediate values as separate files, along with the provenance of the workflow run. The bundle is based on the Research Object Bundle specification, and complies with the W3C PROV-O provenance specification.

For details, see https://github.com/myGrid/taverna-prov

Tutorials and examples

Tutorials for Taverna are available under the Taverna 2.x documentation.

Example workflows can be found under the Starter pack tab in the myExperiment perspective of the Workbench. They can also be downloaded from the myExperiment Web site.

Known issues

Although Taverna 2.5.0 contains many improvements there are some known issues with it. These are detailed in our issue tracker Jira.

System requirements

Please check the details of Taverna 2.5 system requirements.

Licence and source code

All editions of Taverna, except for Astronomy, are distributed under the LGPL 2.1 licence.  The Astronomy editions are distributed under the  GPL 3 licence.

The source code for Taverna can be retrieved from our Subversion repository. We also recommend you to sign up to the taverna-hackers mailing list if you are a developer.

Reporting problems

If you find any problems that are not listed in our Jira, then please send them to the taverna-users or taverna-hackers mailing lists. Our support team is monitoring the mailing lists and will try to respond to questions as soon as possible.

If you prefer not to subscribe to our mailing lists, you can send your questions directly to support@mygrid.org.uk and a member of our support team will respond to your inquiries.