The myGrid team are pleased to announce that their proposal for the funding by the UK EPSRC (the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) of the myGrid platform renewal grant has been successful.

The grant will run from January 2009 to January 2014 and the award of 1.3 million UK pounds will help to fund the team’s fundamental research into e-Science and e-Laboratories. This research underpins work such as Taverna, myExperiment and UTOPIA. The grant recognizes four main themes of the team’s research:

• knowledge management for e-science,
• metadata management in e-laboratories,
• scientific workflow design, management and enactment
• social computing for e-scientists

The grant will be held by people from the Universities of Manchester and Southampton.

Details of the grant can be found at the EPSRC website.

The team is very grateful to everyone who supported the bid. We look forward to collaborating with many of you in the future.

I have updated the Rshell plugin to be compatible with R 2.7+ (and the newest Rserve version). This version is also backwards compatible with R 2.3+ and the correspondig Rserve version. The new Rshell plugin requires Taverna 1.7.1.

The version has some of improvements:

• Support for PDF
• Lesser port types and therefore easier to use (but is still backwards compatible with older versions of Rshell!)
• Syntax highlighting

The installation is a bit more complex than other plugins, because the old Rshell shipped with Taverna 1.7.1. needs to be disabled. However, with the instructions, it should be easy.

This page also includes a user manual of Rshell and some small example workflows.

Feel free to ask questions…

Best wishes,

Ingo Wassink

The Workflow Monitor Web application performs periodic monitoring of workflow Activities (WSDL, Soaplab, Biomoby and Biomart are currently supported) and provides information on their current and historical status. The principal interface is a RESTful web service, employing HTTP POST / GET / PUT / DELETE methods to Create / Read / Update / Delete resources.

For more details on OMII-UK and our software, please visit the OMII website: www.omii.ac.uk.

Regards,

Neil Chue Hong.
OMII-UK

Taverna 2 will be released in December 2008.

• Group announcements - group admins can now make public or private announcements within their group. This is a great way to keep people notified of events.
• Pack downloads - you can now download a snapshot of a pack to your desktop. This will include any workflows and files in the pack as well as a manifest describing the whole pack.
• Sent messages - you can now see all the messages you have sent via the internal messaging system in myExperiment. You can access this by going to your inbox.
• Better tracking of version uploads and editors - you can now easily see who uploaded versions of workflows as well as who last edited metadata.
• Various UI improvements- e.g: better “invite to your groups” box on other user’s profile pages (to easily invite them to your groups).
• Search enhancements - e.g. search for a service used in a workflow.

We hope you find these new features useful. Please do give us feedback!

The myExperiment Team

http://www.myexperiment.org/announcements/21

We already have some Trident workflows, and some experimental plans from chemistry (Usefulchem EXPLANS). You can upload your own types of workflows by going to the upload workflow page (you may be asked to log in). If we can’t automatically detect the type of workflow and infer data from it (like title and description) you can provide this by selecting the “Enter custom metadata” option in step 2.

Note that we currently provide extended support for Taverna 1 workflows only - we can automatically detect the type, parse title/description metadata, generate preview images, view the internals and enact these workflows all directly in myExperiment. In the coming months we aim to work with our user communties to provide extended support for other types of workflows.

If you would like to get involved in providing extended support for other types of workflows then please contact us. We are keen to work with you in getting myExperiment to support as many other workflows types as possible.

Thanks again for all your support!

The myExperiment Team

http://www.myexperiment.org/announcements/20

Congratulations to Ravi Madduri, Wei Tan and all the caBig/Taverna people.