[MOBY-l] Moby in workflows

[Phillip Lord]

>>>>> "Rebecca" == Rebecca Ernst <rebecca.ernst at gsf.de> writes:

  Rebecca> e.g. we are building a portal through which people can
  Rebecca> access all our PlaNet databases (featured by BioMoby). It
  Rebecca> would be great if we could offer them to run several
  Rebecca> workflows which we built already without having to install
  Rebecca> Taverna on their machines. This would involve saving the
  Rebecca> workflows from Taverna, and then executing those saved
  Rebecca> workflows through e.g. a command-line call to Taverna.

This is a requirement that many of the users of the mygrid
technologies have expressed. Indeed, as you might expect, the general
requirement is for an easy web delivered access to both the workflow,
and the end products of the workflow. We are working on general portal
technologies. Others on the mygrid developers list can give a better status
report than I. 

The second issue this raises is that of data integration. Like moby-s,
we don't put a lot of requirements onto the service providers, so you
get back a large pile of flat files, which you then need to wade
through. So we are also working on some general approaches for helping
to visualise the data. 





  Rebecca> I don't know if you ever thought of this possibility!?

  Rebecca> Another thing which I realized : at the moment you will
  Rebecca> have to guess from the name of the service to his
  Rebecca> function. If I want to build a workflow integrating other
  Rebecca> peoples services as well, I need to know what exactly a
  Rebecca> service does. In BioMoby this is described on one hand in
  Rebecca> the human readable description and on the other hand by the
  Rebecca> input/output objects in Moby Central. Is this what you mean
  Rebecca> with annotation information? Or are you talking about the
  Rebecca> service notes?


We also have this sort of semantic service discovery, but its not
available in the main download at the moment. We will try to get this
released soon, as quite a few people need this at the moment. 

As Mark says, we have been discussing this in some detail!

Cheers

Phil