Taverna is an application that eases the use and integration of the growing number of molecular biology tools and databases available on the web, especially web services. It allows bioinformaticians to construct workflows or pipelines of services to perform a range of different analyses, such as sequence analysis and genome annotation. These high-level workflows can integrate many different resources into a single analysis. Taverna is available freely under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) from

Abstract. my Grid is an e-Science project assisting life scientists to build workflows that gather and co-ordinate data from distributed, autonomous, replicated and heterogeneous resources. The provenance logs of workflow executions are recorded as RDF graphs. The log of one workflow run is used to trace the history of its execution process; however, by aggregating provenance logs of workflow reruns, or runs of different workflows, we can gather the provenance of a common data product shared in multiple derivation paths. This aggregation relies on accurate and universal identification of each data product. The nature of bioinformatics data and services, however, makes this difficult. We describe the identity problem in bioinformatics data, and present a protocol for managing identity coreferences and allocating identity to collected and computed data products. The ability to overcome this problem means that the provenance of workflows in bioinformatics and other domains can be themselves exploited to enhance the practice of e-Science. 1

author) Abstract: In this paper we explore issues in the development of the my Grid ontology, which is an OWL ontology designed to support service discovery through service annotation. There are currently more than 3000 services offering programmatic access to bioinformatics resources. Composing these into workflows enables complex in silico experiments to be performed. These services, however, are highly distributed and heterogeneous, with inconsistent naming and descriptions, so service discovery and interpretation for the scientist is not only required, but also very difficult. my Grid offers middleware to support in silico experiments in the Life Sciences, enabling the design and enactment of workflows as well as components to assist service discovery for workflow composition. The my Grid ontology is one component in a larger semantic discovery framework. We describe this framework and the issues that led to its development. Practical experiences have demonstrated that successfully exploiting the ontology is dependent not only on the coverage of the domain and the mode of constructing service descriptions, but also on the complexity of the discovery and annotation tools that accompany it. Here we describe the my Grid ontology and the way the exploitation of it has changed and diversified during the project. From an initial model of formal OWL-DL semantics throughout, we now adopt a spectrum of expressivity and reasoning for different tasks in service annotation and discovery. Here we discuss the implications of this and our experiences in semantic service discovery.

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