21 June 2007

Biomoby & Taverna



AFAIK: Biomoby is a web service , ontology-based (?), for bioinformatics where a central repository which contains the adresses of web services for computational biology. Taverna is a kind of visual pipeline performing some complex bioinformatics tasks.

A few monthes ago, Egon introduced me Taverna and now the latest issue of BMC Bioinformatics contains a paper titled "Seahawk: moving beyond HTML in Web-based bioinformatics analysis": the paper contains many references to the BioMoby project and to Taverna. Seahawk is a Java applet that allows a naïve user to:


  • Load text, HTML, Rich Text, or MOBY XML files from their local disk or a Web site
  • Select all or part of the data displayed (by highlighting or using hyperlinks)
  • Discover then execute services for the selected data
The interface consists of tabbed pane of documents, with MOBY analysis options displayed via popup menus.

BioMoby is indeed something I need to learn: is there anybody in the region of the Evry Genopole, or the UVSQ who could introduce me those technologies ? Thanks a lot.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Pierre, BioMOBY is a registry of web services that have been annotated by service providers using an ontology (well RDF anyway).

Taverna is part of the myGrid project. It is similar to BioMOBY, because it also provides access web services, but a wider range of curated services. Taverna also comes with its own workflow language for plugging services together to perform complex tasks (like genome annoation for example) and visualising the workflows as graphs.

The best way to understand Taverna is to download the latest version of Taverna and play with it to create some workflows. HTH