Apple WWDC 2006 poster

This poster was made for the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2006 in San Francisco, California. It is made by Stian Soiland using the OS X program OmniGraffle.

The poster was originally printed in A0 landscape.

• wwdc-2006.graffle.zip: OmniGraffle^? source document for the poster

• wwdc-2006.pdf: PDF of poster as used by printer (A0 landscape). Remember to select "Scale down" if you are trying to print this on A4.

Considerations

In making this poster, with great help from Katy, Duncan, Jun, David, and Carole, I tried to highlight what could be interesting for non-bioinformaticians in a typical developer conference. I still think there's more that could be changed, for instance tell more about how the workflow engine or service invocation works, instead of listing examples from biology.

I was careful to only use screenshots from the Mac as this is afterall an Apple conference. Since the poster size requirement was A0, I also had to consider font sizes and be careful to use vector graphics whenever possible. Of course, screenshots are still bitmaps.

Abstract

myGrid is a UK e-Science project that provides middleware services to support data-intensive, in silico experiments, predominantly in the Life Sciences.

Bioinformatics data in the public domain is vast, heterogeneous and distributed throughout the world. Whilst the public availability has enabled great advances in the field, the heterogeneity and distribution means using these resources together can be problematic. Experiments often involve chaining together disparate analysis tools and databases.

myGrid enables the interoperation between these services by providing a toolkit for composing, executing and managing workflow experiments. Taverna is the workflow environment of myGrid, which allows the coordinated interconnection between resources, many of which are Web services. Currently, there are over 3000 services known to work with Taverna. Scientists combine these services to form a workflow representing their experiment.

Workflows make it easier for scientists to describe and run in silico experiments and to formalise experimental protocols. Composing and running workflows, however, is not a complete solution for supporting the whole experiment. Workflows exist in the wider context of scientific data management. Scientists need to retrospectively analyse workflow results and compare different workflow invocations with one another. Therefore myGrid provides an environment and components that combine workflows with sophisticated methods of provenance collection, so data carries with it a record of how and why it was produced.

Workflows created by Taverna represent the scientific process of the experiments they enact, making them a rich resource for scientists, who can choose to share, reuse and repurpose them within the myGrid community.

Here, we present an overview of the myGrid project. Although the myGrid user community originates from the Life Sciences, researchers from other disciplines, such as cheminformatics, physics and medical informatics are currently joining the community.

-- StianSoiland - 04 Aug 2006