Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
7.3 SUMMARY
In biomedicine and bioinformatics, services computing infrastructure
now plays a key role in the integration of various data and computa-
tional resources in a uniformmanner. Workflow technologies are widely
used in the orchestration of multiple services to facilitate
in-silico
research. By extending the Taverna Workbench, caGrid Workflow
Toolkit provides a comprehensive solution to compose and coordinate
services in caGrid, which would otherwise remain isolated and dis-
connected from each other. Using the toolkit, users can access more
than 140 services and are offered a rich set of features including
discovery of data and analytical services, query and transfer of data,
security protections for service invocations, state management in
service interactions, and sharing of workflows, experiences, and best
practices. Although we currently focus on application domains such as
cancer (caBIG) and cardiovascular (CVRG), the proposed solution does
not limit itself to any specific application and is general enough to be
applicable and reusable within other services-computing infrastructures.
