Knowledge discovery for biology with Taverna producing and consuming semantics in the web of science

Abstract

Life Science research has extended beyond in vivo and in vitro bench-bound science to incorporate in silico knowledge discovery, using resources that have been developed over time by different teams for different purposes and in different forms. The myGrid project has developed a set of software components and a workbench, Taverna, for building, running and sharing workflows that link third party bioinformatics services, such as databases, analytic tools and applications. Intelligently discovering prior services, workflow or data is aided by a Semantic Web of annotations, as is the building of the workflows themselves. Metadata associated with the workflow experiments, the provenance of the data outcomes and the record of the experimental process need to be flexible and extensible. Semantic Web metadata technologies would seem to be well-suited to building a Semantic Web of provenance. We have the potential to integrate and aggregate workflow outcomes, and reason over provenance logs to identify new experimental insights, and to build and export a Semantic Web of experiments that contributes to Knowledge Discovery for Taverna users and for the scientific community as a whole.