The Taverna project has developed a tool for the composition and enactment of bioinformatics workflows for the life sciences community. The tool includes a workbench application which provides a graphical user interface for the composition of workflows. These workflows are written in a new language called the simple conceptual unified flow language (Scufl), where by each step within a workflow represents one atomic task. Two examples are used to illustrate the ease by which in silico experiments can be represented as Scufl workflows using the workbench application.
Signature databases are vital tools for identifying distant relationships in novel sequences and hence for inferring protein function. InterPro is an integrated documentation resource for protein families, domains and functional sites, which amalgamates the efforts of the PROSITE, PRINTS, Pfam and ProDom database projects. Each InterPro entry includes a functional description, annotation, literature references and links back to the relevant member database(s). Release 2.0 of InterPro (October 2000) contains over 3000 entries, representing families, domains, repeats and sites of post-translational modification encoded by a total of 6804 different regular expressions, profiles, fingerprints and Hidden Markov Models. Each InterPro entry lists all the matches against SWISS-PROT and TrEMBL (more than 1,000,000 hits from 462,500 proteins in SWISS-PROT and TrEMBL). The database is accessible for text- and sequence-based searches at http://www.ebi.ac.uk/interpro/. Questions can be emailed to interhelp@ebi.ac.uk.
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 .
SUMMARYLife sciences research is based on individuals, often with diverse skills, assembled into research groups. These groups use their specialist expertise to address scientific problems. The in silico experiments undertaken by these research groups can be represented as workflows involving the co-ordinated use of analysis programs and information repositories that may be globally distributed. With regards to Grid computing, the requirements relate to the sharing of analysis and information resources rather than sharing computational power. The my Grid project has developed the Taverna workbench for the composition and execution of workflows for the life sciences community. This experience paper describes lessons learnt during the development of Taverna. A common theme is the importance of understanding how workflows fit into the scientists' experimental context. The lessons reflect an evolving understanding of life scientists' requirements on a workflow environment, which is relevant to other areas of data intensive and exploratory science.
Gene Ontology Annotation (GOA) is a project run by the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) that aims to provide assignments of terms from the Gene Ontology (GO) resource to gene products in a number of its databases (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/GOA). In the first stage of this project, GO assignments have been applied to a data set representing the complete human proteome by a combination of electronic mappings and manual curation. This vocabulary has also been applied to the nonredundant proteome sets for all other completely sequenced organisms as well as to proteins from a wide range of organisms where the proteome is not yet complete.
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