There are alternative ways of creating workflows that can be run by Taverna 1.x. One of these is Seahawk from BioMoby.
Using the Seahawk applet, users can progress data between Moby services. The flow of the data between the services can be saved as a Taverna 1.x workflow. Such a workflow can then be run with Taverna 1.x. Saving and re-running the workflows allows the user’s work to be documented and repeated.
Taverna 2.x workflow format differs from that of Taverna 1.x. The .t2flow format might not be easy to understand as it reflects heavily on the Java implementation, but there is a set of XML schemas that can help. Due to dependencies on Taverna’s plugin system Raven, it is unfortunately neither very easy to use Taverna’s parser/writer implementation for t2flow from outside Taverna.
To address these issues, for Taverna 3.x we have developed a standalone workflow specification called SCUFL2, this comes with a Java API which can be used as a set of freestanding JARs. This API can import .t2flow and allow inspection, creation, modification. This API exports to a new .wfbundle format which can be read by the Taverna 3 command line executor, but not (yet) by the Taverna 2 workbench.
