MyGrid and UTOPIA: An integrated approach to enacting and visualising in silico experiments in the life sciences

Abstract

In silico experiments have hitherto required ad hoc collections of scripts and programs to process and visualise biological data, consuming substantial amounts of time and effort to build, and leading to tools that are difficult to use, are architecturally fragile and scale poorly. With examples of the systems applied to real biological problems, we describe two complimentary software frameworks that address this problem in a principled manner; myGrid/Taverna, a workflow design and enactment environment enabling coherent experiments to be built, and UTOPIA, a flexible visualisation system to aid in examining experimental results. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.