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functions, and uses reasoning techniques to infer service annotations. 44 Over
800 services are described using ontologies 45 expertly annotated by a full-time
curator used by clients such as Find-O-Matic, its discovery tool, Feta, 46 which
is only available as a plug-in from the Taverna Workflow Workbench. The Bio-
Catalogue * project 47 incorporates the experiences of the Taverna Registry and
myExperiment (Section 13.6) to build and manage a richly described catalog
of Web services in the Life Sciences. The catalog's services have descriptive
content capturing functional capabilities curated by experts and by the com-
munity through social collaboration; operational content such as quality of
service and popularity is automatically curated by monitoring and use anal-
ysis. The BioCatalogue is a free-standing component with its own RESTful
APIs that can be embedded within and accessed from third-party applica-
tions. Developers can incorporate new services through simple actions and can
load a pre-existing workflow as a service definition within the service palette,
which can then be used as a service instance within the current workflow.
Taverna also supports the configuration of the appearance of the graphical
representation of workflows, so that a workflow can be suppressed to give
higher-level views, for example, to remove details such as data translation (or
other “shim”) services.
One of the most powerful aspects of Triana is its GUI. It has evolved in
its Java form for over 10 years and contains a number of powerful editing
capabilities, wizards for on-the-fly creation of tools, and GUI builders for cre-
ating user interfaces. Triana editing capabilities include multilevel grouping
for simplifying workflows, cut/copy/paste/undo, ability to edit input/output
nodes (to make copies of data and add parameter dependencies, remote con-
trols, or plug-ins), zoom functions, various cabling types, optional inputs, type
checking, and so on. Since Triana came from the gravitational-wave field, the
system contains a wide-ranging palette of tools (around 400) for the analy-
sis and manipulation of one-dimensional data, which are mostly written in
Java (with some in C). Recently, other extensive toolkits have been added for
audio analysis, image processing, text editing, for creating retinopathy work-
flows (i.e., for diabetic retinopathy studies), and even data mining based on
configurable Web services to aid in the composition process. See Taylor 48 for
a further discussion and description of such applications.
Wings 35 uses rich semantic descriptions of components and workflow tem-
plates expressed in terms of domain ontologies and constraints. Wings has
a workflow template editor to compose components and their dataflow. The
editor assists the user by enforcing the constraints specified for the work-
flow components. It also assists the user with data selection, to ensure the
datasets selected conform to the requirements of the workflow template. With
* http://biocatalogue.org
Shims align or mediate data that is syntactically or semantically closely related but not directly
compatible. 49
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