Seek produced in collaboration with the SysModb: Systems Biology of Micro-Organisms DataBase Finding, sharing and exchanging data, models and processes in Systems Biology
MethodBox Browse datasets and share knowledge.
RightField Sharing the meaning of your data by embedding ontology annotation in spreadsheets
Workflows for Ever Scientific workflow preservation
History
The consortium has three distinct phases:
Phase 1
The consortium was formed in 2001, bringing together collaborators at the Universities of Manchester, Southampton, Newcastle, Nottingham and Sheffield, The EuropeanMolecular Biology Laboratory-European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge, and industrial partners GlaxoSmithKline, Merck KGaA, AstraZeneca, Sun Microsystems, IBM, GeneticXchange, Epistemics and Cerebra,. The UKEngineering and Physical Sciences Research Council funded the first phase of the project with £3.5 million. To date, Grid development has focused on the basic issues of storage, computation and resource management needed to make a global scientific community's information and tools accessible in a high performance environment. However, from an e-Science viewpoint, the purpose of the Grid is to deliver a collaborative and supportive environment that allows geographically distributed scientists to achieve research goals more effectively. MyGrid will design, develop and demonstrate higher level functionalities over an existing Grid infrastructure that support scientists in making use of complex distributed resources. The project has developed an e-Science workbench called Taverna that supports:
the scientific process of experimental investigation, evidence accumulation and result assimilation;
the scientist's use of the community's information; and
scientific collaboration, allowing dynamic groupings to tackle emergent research problems.
The myGrid project has also developed myExperiment to allow sharing of scientific workflows from Taverna and other Scientific workflow systems. The Taverna workbench supports individual scientists by providing personalisation facilities relating to resource selection, data management and process enactment. The design and development activity will be informed by and evaluated using problems in bioinformatics, which is characterised by a highly distributed community, with many shared tools resources. myGrid will develop two application environments, one that supports individual scientists in the analysis of functional genomic data, and another that supports the annotation of a pattern database. Both of these tasks require explicit representation and enactment of scientific processes, and have challenging performance requirements.
Phase 2
In phase 2, from 2006 to 2009, the consortium is funded for £2 million as part of the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute. The membership of the consortium was concentrated in the University of Manchester and EMBL-EBI.
