Katy Wolstencroft

Taverna: a tool for building and running workflows of services

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 .

BioCatalogue: a universal catalogue of web services for the life sciences

The use of Web Services to enable programmatic access to on-line bioinformatics is becoming increasingly important in the Life Sciences. However, their number, distribution and the variable quality of their documentation can make their discovery and subsequent use difficult. A Web Services registry with information on available services will help to bring together service providers and their users. The BioCatalogue (http://www.biocatalogue.org/) provides a common interface for registering, browsing and annotating Web Services to the Life Science community. Services in the BioCatalogue can be described and searched in multiple ways based upon their technical types, bioinformatics categories, user tags, service providers or data inputs and outputs. They are also subject to constant monitoring, allowing the identification of service problems and changes and the filtering-out of unavailable or unreliable resources. The system is accessible via a human-readable ‘Web 2.0’-style interface and a programmatic Web Service interface. The BioCatalogue follows a community approach in which all services can be registered, browsed and incrementally documented with annotations by any member of the scientific community.

The my Grid ontology: bioinformatics service discovery

(my)Grid supports in silico experiments in the life sciences, enabling the design and enactment of workflows as well as providing components to assist service discovery, data and metadata management. The (my)Grid ontology is one component in a larger semantic discovery framework for the identification of the highly distributed and heterogeneous bioinformatics services in the public domain. 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 development and use of the (my)Grid ontology and our experiences in semantic service discovery.

Using OWL to model biological knowledge

Much has been written of the facilities for ontology building and reasoning offered for ontologies expressed in the Web Ontology Language (OWL). Less has been written about how the modelling requirements of different areas of interest are met by OWL-DLs underlying model of the world. In this paper we use the disciplines of biology and bioinformatics to reveal the requirements of a community that both needs and uses ontologies. We use a case study of building an ontology of protein phosphatases to show how OWL-DLs model can capture a large proportion of the communitys needs. We demonstrate how Ontology Design Patterns (ODPs) can extend inherent limitations of this model. We give examples of relationships between more than two instances; lists and exceptions, and conclude by illustrating what OWL-DL and its underlying description logic either cannot handle in theory or because of lack of implementation. Finally, we present a research agenda that, if fulfilled, would help ensure OWLs wider take up in the life science community.

A little semantic web goes a long way in biology

We show how state-of-the-art Semantic Web technology can be used in e-Science, in particular, to automate the classification of proteins in biology. We show that the resulting classification was of comparable quality to that performed by a human expert, and how investigations using the classified data even resulted in the discovery of significant information that had previously been overlooked, leading to the identification of a possible drug-target.

Data curation + process curation=data integration + science

In bioinformatics, we are familiar with the idea of curated data as a prerequisite for data integration. We neglect, often to our cost, the curation and cataloguing of the processes that we use to integrate and analyse our data. Programmatic access to services, for data and processes, means that compositions of services can be made that represent the in silico experiments or processes that bioinformaticians perform. Data integration through workflows depends on being able to know what services exist and where to find those services. The large number of services and the operations they perform, their arbitrary naming and lack of documentation, however, mean that they can be difficult to use. The workflows themselves are composite processes that could be pooled and reused but only if they too can be found and understood. Thus appropriate curation, including semantic mark-up, would enable processes to be found, maintained and consequently used more easily. This broader view on semantic annotation is vital for full data integration that is necessary for the modern scientific analyses in biology. This article will brief the community on the current state of the art and the current challenges for process curation, both within and without the Life Sciences.

Community-driven computational biology with Debian Linux

BackgroundThe Open Source movement and its technologies are popular in the bioinformatics community because they provide freely available tools and resources for research. In order to feed the steady demand for updates on software and associated data, a service infrastructure is required for sharing and providing these tools to heterogeneous computing environments.ResultsThe Debian Med initiative provides ready and coherent software packages for medical informatics and bioinformatics. These packages can be used together in Taverna workflows via the UseCase plugin to manage execution on local or remote machines. If such packages are available in cloud computing environments, the underlying hardware and the analysis pipelines can be shared along with the software.ConclusionsDebian Med closes the gap between developers and users. It provides a simple method for offering new releases of software and data resources, thus provisioning a local infrastructure for computational biology. For geographically distributed teams it can ensure they are working on the same versions of tools, in the same conditions. This contributes to the world-wide networking of researchers.

Populous: a tool for building OWL ontologies from templates.

BackgroundOntologies are being developed for the life sciences to standardise the way we describe and interpret the wealth of data currently being generated. As more ontology based applications begin to emerge, tools are required that enable domain experts to contribute their knowledge to the growing pool of ontologies. There are many barriers that prevent domain experts engaging in the ontology development process and novel tools are needed to break down these barriers to engage a wider community of scientists.ResultsWe present Populous, a tool for gathering content with which to construct an ontology. Domain experts need to add content, that is often repetitive in its form, but without having to tackle the underlying ontological representation. Populous presents users with a table based form in which columns are constrained to take values from particular ontologies. Populated tables are mapped to patterns that can then be used to automatically generate the ontologys content. These forms can be exported as spreadsheets, providing an interface that is much more familiar to many biologists.ConclusionsPopulouss contribution is in the knowledge gathering stage of ontology development; it separates knowledge gathering from the conceptualisation and axiomatisation, as well as separating the user from the standard ontology authoring environments. Populous is by no means a replacement for standard ontology editing tools, but instead provides a useful platform for engaging a wider community of scientists in the mass production of ontology content.

Analysing Scientific Workflows: Why Workflows Not Only Connect Web Services

Life science workflow systems are developed to help life scientists to conveniently connect various programs and web services. In practice however, much time is spent on data conversion, because web services provided by different organisations use different data formats. We have analysed all the Taverna workflows available at the my Experiment web site on December 11, 2008. Our analysis of the tasks in these workflows shows several noticeable aspects: their number ranges from 1 to 70 tasks per workflow; 18% of the workflows consist of a single task.Of the tasks used are 22% web services; local services, i.e. tasks executed by the workflow system itself, are very popular and cover 57% of tasks; tasks implemented by the workflow designer, scripting tasks, are is also used often (14%). Our analysis shows that over 30\% of tasks are related to data conversion.

Constructing ontology-driven protein family databases

MOTIVATION Protein family databases provide a central focus for scientific communities as well as providing useful resources to aide research. However, such resources require constant curation and often become outdated and discontinued. We have developed an ontology-driven system for capturing and managing protein family data that addresses the problems of maintenance and sustainability. RESULTS Using protein phosphatases and ABC transporters as model protein families, we constructed two protein family database resources around a central DAML+OIL ontology. Each resource contains specialist information about each protein family, providing specialized domain-specific resources based on the same template structure. The formal structure, combined with the extraction of biological data using GO terms, allows for automated update strategies. Despite the functional differences between the two protein families, the ontology model was equally applicable to both, demonstrating the generic nature of the system. AVAILABILITY The protein phosphatase resource, PhosphaBase, is freely available on the internet (http://www.bioinf.man.ac.uk/phosphabase). The DAML+OIL ontology for the protein phosphatases and the ABC transporters is available on request from the authors. CONTACT kwolstencroft@cs.man.ac.uk.