Opening new gateways to workflows for life scientists.

The combination of highly complex biology problems and varying IT skills among life scientists poses a unique challenge in designing bioinformatics programs. The set of tools and initiatives described in this work shows new ways of making life science workflows more accessible to the community. Our aim is to help bioinformaticians help biologists. We present how to make Taverna workflows available from within Galaxy, both widely used bioinformatics platforms. Calling Galaxy tools from Taverna is also discussed. In addition, we describe a web application that allows a user to run arbitrary Taverna workflows by only using a web browser.

A criticality-based framework for task composition in multi-agent bioinformatics integration systems.

MOTIVATION: During task composition, such as can be found in distributed query processing, workflow systems and AI planning, decisions have to be made by the system and possibly by users with respect to how a given problem should be solved. Although there is often more than one correct way of solving a given problem, these multiple solutions do not necessarily lead to the same result. Some researchers are addressing this problem by providing data provenance information. Others use expert advice encoded in a supporting knowledge-base. In this paper, we propose an approach that assesses the importance of such decisions with respect to the overall result. We present a way of measuring decision criticality and describe its potential use. RESULTS: A multi-agent bioinformatics integration system is used as the basis of a framework that facilitates such functionality. We propose an agent architecture, and a concrete bioinformatics example (prototype) is used to show how certain decisions may not be critical in the context of more complex tasks.