myGrid has ontologies for semantic service discovery (the myGrid ontology) and for managing process provenance (the workflow run ontology). They have in general been authored in OWL using Protégé 4.
The latest version of the myGrid ontology is available on-line. The myGrid domain ontology for bioinformatics services is available separately.
The myGrid ontology is used within Feta (our service discovery tool) and by the BioCatalogue (a curated catalogue of Life Science Web services).
Feta allows services to be identified by their functions or properties, for example, inputs/outputs, underlying data resources, methods or tasks. Feta can potentially be used to describe services in any domain, but initially, we have concentrated on the bioinformatics domain. Therefore, the myGrid ontology can be considered to be logically separated into an ontology of service properties and an ontology of bioinformatics tasks, functions and resources. We see other “domain” ontologies being added as and when they are developed, for example for chemoinformatics or medical imaging.
We have aligned our service description model with that of the Biomoby service description model so that Feta can search over both service registries. Please see the BioMoby Web site.
Feta can be downloaded as a plugin to the Taverna 1.7.x Workbench and used to search over services that have been annotated with the myGrid ontology. There is no Feta plugin for Taverna Workbench 2.x, where the similar functionality will be provided by the BioCatalogue plugin.
BioCatalogue uses terms from the myGrid ontology to tag the catalogued services. In the future, BioCatalogue will support other ontologies as well, such as EDAM.
BioCatalogue plugin for the Taverna Workbench 2.x is planned for the second half of 2010. It will enable you to perform a full BioCatalogue search and pull all the service annotations. It will also enable you to add new annotations to services in BioCatalogue.
