Taverna
The myGrid e-Laboratory contains a suite of tools for designing and executing workflows. The main tool is Taverna Workbench. This tool allows for the automation of experimental methods through the use of a number of services, including Web Services. Taverna has been used successfully in a very diverse set of domains, from music to meteorology to medicine.
Taverna 1.7.1
for
 Windows |
 Mac OS |
 Linux and Unix |
Taverna 2.0
Taverna 2.0, the preliminary release of Taverna 2, is available for download.
Developer Information
If you want to develop code to use Taverna, or to integrate Taverna with your own applications, then you should read the Developer Information.
Workflows
A workflow represents an experimental protocol, or methodology. Each workflow is constructed from one or more services, which may connected directly into another service. This enables a chain of services to be linked together in a systematic manner. As a consequence, Workflows enable the automation of in silico experiments (from small to very large-scale) and the formalisation of experimental protocols. Taverna allows researchers to combine and co-ordinate distributed analysis tools and data resources into workflows. Taverna has access to over 3500 resources - Web Services (SOAP/WSDL), R-scripts (from the R statistical package), BioMart databases, BioMoby services, and many more.
Each service and piece of data can be located on your own machine or anywhere on the internet, to which you have access. The services that you include in your workflows are not pre-defined, allowing you to customise the workflow to your own needs. During the construction of a workflow, users can search for services that they require, or select one they already know about (including their own services or scripts). This is conducted dynamically, meaning that you can add services as and when required.
Once constructed, researchers are then able execute the workflow from within Taverna, allowing input data to be sent from one service to the next without the need for any user interaction (unless specified otherwise with interaction services).
Getting started
Useful information is included in the starter pack for Taverna.
If you have any queries relating to Taverna or its use, please use either the taverna-hackers (for coding related issues / questions) or taverna-users (for general use case issues and questions) mailing lists
Contributing to Taverna
If you would like to contribute to Taverna source code then you need to fill in a Contributor Licence Agreement. It is useful to first look at the Taverna Governance Model.
Associated tools
Associated with Taverna are some tools that ease the use of workflows. Taverna itself can be extended by the use of plugins written by clients of Taverna to extend its basic functionality. An example plugin was written by the myExperiment team to access content from myExperiment from directly within Taverna.
Referencing Taverna
If you want to reference Taverna in a paper or to reference this website, please see the Referencing and Citation page.
Publications about taverna
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Presentations about taverna
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presentation(s) about taverna
tutorial(s) about taverna