CaGrid Workflow Toolkit: A taverna based workflow tool for cancer grid

CaGrid selected Taverna as its workflow execution system of choice due to its integration with web service technology and support for a wide range of web services, plug-in architecture to cater for easy integration of third party extensions, etc. The caGrid Workflow Toolkit (or the toolkit for short), an extension to the Taverna workflow system, is designed and implemented to ease building and running caGrid workflows. It provides users with support for various phases in using workflows: service discovery, composition and orchestration, data access, and secure service invocation, which have been identified by the caGrid community as challenging in a multi-institutional and cross-discipline domain.By extending the Taverna Workbench, caGrid Workflow Toolkit provided a comprehensive solution to compose and coordinate services in caGrid, which would otherwise remain isolated and disconnected from each other. Using it users can access more than 140 services and are offered with a rich set of features including discovery of data and analytical services, query and transfer of data, security protections for service invocations, state management in service interactions, and sharing of workflows, experiences and best practices. The proposed solution is general enough to be applicable and reusable within other service-computing infrastructures that leverage similar technology stack.For years, web-based systems have provided biological and medical scientists access to various data and computation resources to facilitate their scientific exploration. To achieve a fully functional data pipeline, scientists used to switch among browsers, copy from one web page, convert the obtained data and paste it to another one. The emergence of web services made their functionality accessible by computer programs which helped automate the data pipeline that was previously performed manually. Today, the number of available web services has grown significantly. BioCatalogue [1], a curated catalo