Taverna has now moved to the Apache Software Foundation. For updated information, see Apache Taverna (incubating).

caGrid

caGrid is part of caBIG (cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid), a US project to carry out eScience and bioinformatics in cancer research.

The Taverna team were funded by the US National Cancer Institute (NCI) to help integrate Taverna with caGrid, so that Taverna can find and use (secured and non-secured) caBIG data and analytical services found on caGrid.

The team wrapped a selection of typical non-caBIG services used by Taverna users so that they are annotated and comply with caBIG’s Silver-level compatibility requirements.

The team also implemented a plugin for Taverna 2.1.2 that enables semantic search for caGrid services described by the caGrid’s Index Service and adding them as component to workflows.

More details about the project and the deliverables can be found on the project’s Wiki pages and NCI’s Gforge project pages. Source code of the Taverna plugins is available from the SVN repository. The project ran from September 2008 to November 2009.

The work on the caGrid project follows on from caGrid’s previous adoption of Taverna when the Taverna and caGrid collaborated in 2007 to develop a Taverna 1.7.0 GT4 processor as a plugin based upon the Taverna’s WSDL processor. This work has been updated for Taverna 2.x and there are two plugins available: caGrid plugin (for invoking caGrid services) and caGrid remote execution plugin (for remote execution of caGrid workflows on a server).

The functionality of the Taverna 1.7.0 caGrid plugin was shown at a caGrid meeting in late 2008 where the associated poster won an outstanding poster award.

The installation and use of the Taverna 1.7.0 caGrid plugin is described on the caGrid wiki.

Publications

The paper “Combining the Power of Taverna and caGrid: Scientific Workflows that Enable Web-Scale Collaboration” has been written by Wei Tan, Ian Foster and Ravi Madduri to describe some of the work done on the project.