How do I use my database from Taverna?

Processors within a Taverna workflow can be viewed as functions - that is to say you feed them a set of inputs, press 'go' and get a set of results. A database in contrast just sits there until you query it so some kind of intermediate layer is required. There are a few different options;

• The most sophisticated is to use Taverna's extension points to implement a full query interface including a server side query service and GUI plugins to build the query and present the user with database metadata to assist that. This is a lot of work, we maintain an example of this in the BioMart^? processor.
• The second option is to create a standard SOAP or other protocol service which exposes a 'canned query' interface allowing a restricted subset of all possible queries at which point it just looks like another service and Taverna can invoke it as per usual.
• If your data is amenable to it the third way is to make use of the existing BioMart^? processor and expose your own data set as a BioMart^? (see http://www.biomart.org for more details).
• Fourthly, if there is a JDBC interface to the database then you can use the jdbc Local Java widgets