[MOBY-l] Moby in workflows

[Rebecca Ernst]

Hi Tom!

Within the PlaNet project which aims to integrate European plant 
databases we are using BioMoby as the integration technology.
We recently played with Taverna (Martin Senger told me that Taverna is 
'mobyfied' now) and found it an amazingly good tool for building workflows!
Since then we are certainly promoting it heavily! ;-)
For making use of Taverna within the PlaNet project it would be perfect 
if there would be a possiblility of a standalone/non-interactive 
application of Taverna.
e.g. we are building a portal through which people can access all our 
PlaNet databases (featured by BioMoby). It would be great if we could 
offer them to run several workflows which we built already without 
having to install Taverna on their machines. This would involve saving 
the workflows from Taverna, and then executing those saved workflows 
through e.g. a command-line call to Taverna.
I don't know if you ever thought of this possibility!?

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


Cheers,
Rebecca.



Tom Oinn wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I run the Taverna project (http://taverna.sf.net), a workflow design 
> and enactment system which supports BioMoby and I figured it was time 
> I de-lurked and started to pester you with questions, I hope you'll 
> forgive me!
>
> I'd really just like to get a feel for whether people are using 
> Taverna; if so for what and how could we improve it, and if not then 
> why and how can we persuade you. I'm aware of a couple of shortcomings 
> in our Moby support, there's an issue with empty results and we don't 
> pick up annotations at all at the moment - it's the second of those 
> that I'm curious about (we can sort the first out, it's mostly a 
> technical issue). If you were chaining multiple service together how 
> would the annotation information manifest in this flow?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Tom Oinn (EMBL-EBI)
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-- 
Rebecca Ernst
MIPS, Inst. for Bioinformatics
GSF Research Center for Environment and Health
Ingolstaedter Landstr. 1
85764 Neuherberg
fon: +49 89 3187 3583
email: Rebecca.Ernst at gsf.de