The Collaborations Workshop will be held on 21-22 March at Queen’s College, Oxford.

Registration is now open (http://bit.ly/CW12Reg).

For more information, visit the Collaborations Workshop website.

Meet with researchers and software developers

A fresh perspective can help solve problems or come up with new ideas. The workshop brings together researchers from a wide range of disciplines, and software developers with experience of working for the research community. It is this variety of backgrounds that makes the workshop productive.

To see who’s attending, visit the website.

You control the agenda

The workshop is split into a series of discussion sessions. As a delegate, you can nominate topics for discussion: anything from a problem specific to your research, to an issue that affects the entire research community. We will then discuss the topic and try to find solutions.

To see the discussion topics that have been suggested so far, visit the website.

Everything is flexible

Everything about the workshop is flexible. Delegates control what they talk about. If someone wants time to present results, time will be found. If more time is needed for a discussion, it will be added.

To see the agenda, visit the website.

Everything is open

Information on the planning of the workshop, the agenda items, the presentations, the reporting-back sessions, and post-workshop progress will all be available on the CW12 website.

For more information, visit the Collaborations Workshop website, or send us an email (info@software.ac.uk).

The Software Sustainability Institute

The Software Sustainability Institute is a national facility for building better software. We are funded by the EPSRC, with additional funding from JISC, and are based at the universities of Edinburgh, Manchester and Southampton.

For more information, visit the Institute’s website.

Sponsors

This year, our gold sponsor is Digital Social Research, which maximises the uptake, use and impact of new digital technologies across the social science community.

We are also sponsored by the SeIUCCR project, which is a network of Community Champions who advocate the use of e-Infrastructures in their research, and the DevCSI project, which helps software developers
realise their full potential.

The course will provide an introduction to using Galaxy and Taverna in Next Generation analysis and will highlight the increasing requirements for reproducible workflows when performing high-throughput informatics research.

For more details and to register please see the Nowgen Web site:
http://www.nowgen.org.uk/facilities/events/event.php?id=30

SADI is a set of standards-compliant best practices that simplify interoperability between semantic Web services. The SADI codebase make it easy for people to deploy services that adhere to the SADI framework practices. The SADI plugin allows semantic services to be accessed from Taverna. The plugin has been developed by the SADI team (with the support of the Genome Canada Bioinformatics Platform).

The SADI plugin is available as a prototype plugin. For details on how to install plugins see:
http://www.mygrid.org.uk/dev/wiki/display/taverna/Installing+plugins

Documentation on the SADI plugin, including a link to a tutorial on SlideShare is available on the SADI wiki:
http://code.google.com/p/sadi/wiki/TavernaPlugin

If you have any problems or questions about the SADI plugin or need help, please contact sadi-discuss@googlegroups.com

This workshop will be on the 14-15th November 2011 and held in Manchester, UK. Full details of the IMPACT/myGrid Hackathon and online registration can be found on the wiki at:

http://impact-mygrid-taverna-hackathon.wikispaces.com/

Registration for this event is free, however there is a ‘no-show’ fee for those who book but who do not turn up.

Summary of the event:

This free workshop will showcase how scientific workflows can be used in digitisation and related fields. Using a number of tools developed in the IMPACT project the workshop will explore how they interact within the Taverna platform and will then lead exploration of some advanced use cases and technical challenges.

The workshop aims to bring together technical staff – ‘developers’ and ‘implementers’, rather than ‘practitioners’ in order to encourage the further development of the tools and investigate new solutions and features that could be developed in the near future for the benefit of the wider community.

The workshop will be run by the technical staff of the IMPACT project in conjunction with the Taverna developers.

Biodiversity science is the study of plants and animals that inhabit our planet and the environments they live in. Amid growing concerns over the extinction rate of certain species as their natural habitats are increasingly destroyed, and with biodiversity becoming as important as climate change on the political agenda, this new research project could not be more timely.

Starting in September 2011, the three-year project called Biodiversity Virtual e‑Laboratory (BioVeL) will establish an international e-Laboratory – the first of its kind in Europe – that will allow biodiversity scientists to jointly tackle diverse research challenges.

Experts from Cardiff University along with 15 partners from institutions across Europe, hope that when completed, the BioVeL e-Laboratory will, for the first time, give scientists access to multiple data, analysis and computing resources for biodiversity science through a robust e-Science infrastructure.

Coordinator of the project, Alex Hardisty of the School of Computer Science and Informatics, Cardiff, commented: “The outcomes from this project will improve the study of biodiversity. All scientists will benefit directly from the tools, knowledge and expertise assembled in this infrastructure, offering the promise of new opportunities to more easily research substantial biodiversity problems with societal impact.”

Ranked by the European Commission (EC) as top of its class from more than 60 proposals, BioVeL is funded under the EC’s FP7 e-Infrastructures programme to support the creation of the European Research Area.

For further information on the BioVeL project, visit http://www.biovel.eu/

“This is an introductory tutorial covering bioinformatics workflows using Taverna workflow management system and on how to avoid ‘re-inventing the workflow’ by using community developed/published services.”

The event is taking place at:

University College London,
Engineering, Room 1.02
Malet Place
London, WC1E 6BT

More details of the talk can be found here.

CDK-Taverna allows users to include tools from the popular Chemistry Development Kit (CDK) within Taverna 2 workflows.

To install the plugin, go to Advanced -> Updates and plugins in Taverna 2.3 Workbench. Click on “Find New Plugins” and you should see the CDK plugin listed as a 3rd party plugin. Tick the box and click “Install”. After the plugin has installed, click “Close” and then restart Taverna 2.3.0.

See our User Manual pages for more information on how to download, install and use the plugin.

More information about the CDK-Taverna plugin is available from the authors’ wiki.

See their blog about their experiences in installing and running Taverna-Galaxy.

• Jia Zhang, Wei Tan, John Alexander, Ian Foster, Ravi Madduri. Recommend-As-You-Go: A Novel Approach Supporting Services-Oriented Scientific Workflow Reuse. (to be published)

Two other papers related to Taverna have also been published at the same conference:

• Wei Tan, Jia Zhang, Ravi Madduri, Ian Foster, David De Roure, Carole Goble. Providing Map and GPS Assistance to Service Composition in Bioinformatics. (available in pre-print)
• Jia Zhang, Ravi Madduri, Wei Tan, Kevin Deichl, John Alexander, Ian Foster. Toward Semantics Empowered Biomedical Web Services. (to be published)

If you use software in your research and you have a good understanding of what’s happening in your field (and an idea about what will be happening soon) then the Software Sustainability Institute want to hear from you. The institute will pay researchers from any discipline up to £3000 a year to attend conferences and report on the latest developments in their field.

If you are interested visit www.software.ac.uk/agents to find out how to apply – closing date is 8th August 2011.

The Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) is funded by the research councils to help researchers use and develop software for their research. To better understand the fields that most need our help, the institute are setting up a network of Agents. Working as an Agent, you will receive travelling expenses in return for a short report about the conference you attended, the people you met and your views on the topics that look most promising in the future.

The benefits:

• Up to £3000 a year to attend the conferences and events that you want to attend
• Your advocacy will ensure that your field benefits from the best support for software development
• Add world-leading researchers to your professional network
• Free attendance at training events for new tools and technologies
• If you develop code, improve your knowledge of effective techniques for developing sustainable software
• A great addition to your CV

You don’t have to be a professor or a Principal Investigator. We are looking for UK-based researchers with a good knowledge of their field, who are keen to travel and to meet new people, and have experience of national and international collaborations. We are looking for applicants from all disciplines and especially from the fields that have been flagged as strategically important to UK research: the ageing population, environment and climate change, the digital economy, energy and food security.

After a three-month trial period, Agents will be recruited for an initial term of one year, which is renewable each year. We expect to recruit around ten Agents every year.

By becoming an SSI Agent, you will attend more of the conferences that you want to attend, meet influential researchers from across all disciplines and ensure that your field receives the best support for software development. If
you’re interested, or you’d like to nominate someone, please visit www.software.ac.uk/agents. If you would like more information, email Agents@software.ac.uk.