The myGrid consortium produces and uses a suite of tools design to “help e-Scientists get on with science and get on with scientists”. The tools support the creation of e-laboratories and have been used in domains as diverse as

systems biology Systems biology is the computational modeling, computational and mathematical analysis and modeling of complex biological systems. It is a biology-based interdisciplinary field of study that focuses on complex interactions within biological syst ...

social science Social science is one of the branches of science, devoted to the study of societies and the relationships among individuals within those societies. The term was formerly used to refer to the field of sociology, the original "science of soc ...

music Music is generally defined as the The arts, art of arranging sound to create some combination of Musical form, form, harmony, melody, rhythm or otherwise Musical expression, expressive content. Exact definition of music, definitions of mu ...

astronomy Astronomy () is a natural science that studies astronomical object, celestial objects and phenomena. It uses mathematics, physics, and chemistry in order to explain their origin and chronology of the Universe, evolution. Objects of interest ...

multimedia Multimedia is a form of communication that uses a combination of different content forms such as text, audio, images, animations, or video into a single interactive presentation, in contrast to tradi ...

and chemistry. The consortium is led by

Carole Goble Carole Anne Goble, (born 10 April 1961) is a British academic who is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. She is principal investigator (PI) of the myGrid, BioCatalogue and myExperiment projects and co-leads the I ...

of the Department of Computer Science at the

University of Manchester The University of Manchester is a public university, public research university in Manchester, England. The main campus is south of Manchester city centre, Manchester City Centre on Wilmslow Road, Oxford Road. The university owns and operates majo ...

, UK.

Tools produced and used by myGrid

Tools developed by the myGrid consortium include: * The

Taverna workbench Apache Taverna was an open source software tool for designing and executing workflows, initially created by the myGrid project under the name ''Taverna Workbench'', then a project under the Apache incubator. Taverna allowed users to integrate many ...

for designing, editing and executing scientific workflows *

myExperiment myExperiment is a social web site for researchers sharing research objects such as scientific workflows. The myExperiment website was launched in November 2007 and contains a significant collection of scientific workflows for a variety of workf ...

for sharing workflows and related data * BioCatalogue a public registry of Web services for Life Scientists * 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 * The Kidney and Urinary Pathway Database (KUPKB) * Workflows for Ever (wf4ever) 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 Manchester () is a city in Greater Manchester, England. It had a population of 552,000 in 2021. It is bordered by the Cheshire Plain to the south, the Pennines to the north and east, and the neighbouring city of City of Salford, Salford to ...

Southampton Southampton () is a port City status in the United Kingdom, city in the ceremonial county of Hampshire in southern England. It is located approximately south-west of London and west of Portsmouth. The city forms part of the South Hampshire, S ...

, Newcastle,

Nottingham Nottingham ( , locally ) is a city and unitary authority area in Nottinghamshire, East Midlands, England. It is located north-west of London, south-east of Sheffield and north-east of Birmingham. Nottingham has links to the legend of Robi ...

and

Sheffield Sheffield is a city status in the United Kingdom, city in South Yorkshire, England, whose name derives from the River Sheaf which runs through it. The city serves as the administrative centre of the City of Sheffield. It is Historic counties o ...

, The

European Molecular Biology Laboratory The European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) is an intergovernmental organization dedicated to molecular biology research and is supported by 27 member states, two prospect states, and one associate member state. EMBL was created in 1974 a ...

European Bioinformatics Institute The European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) is an Intergovernmental Organization (IGO) which, as part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) family, focuses on research and services in bioinformatics. It is located on the We ...

(EMBL-EBI) in Cambridge, and industrial partners

GlaxoSmithKline GSK plc, formerly GlaxoSmithKline plc, is a British Multinational corporation, multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology company with global headquarters in London, England. Established in 2000 by a Mergers and acquisitions, merger of Gl ...

Merck KGaA The Merck Group, branded and commonly known as Merck, is a German multinational science and technology company headquartered in Darmstadt, with about 60,000 employees and present in 66 countries. The group includes around 250 companies; the ma ...

AstraZeneca AstraZeneca plc () is a British-Swedish multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology company with its headquarters at the Cambridge Biomedical Campus in Cambridge, England. It has a portfolio of products for major diseases in areas includ ...

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, ...

, IBM, GeneticXchange, Epistemics and Cerebra, (formerly Network Inference). The UK

Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is a British Research Council that provides government funding for grants to undertake research and postgraduate degrees in engineering and the physical sciences, mainly to univers ...

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 E-Science or eScience is computationally intensive science that is carried out in highly distributed network environments, or science that uses immense data sets that require grid computing; the term sometimes includes technologies that enable dis ...

workbench called

Taverna A taverna (Greek: ταβέρνα) is a small Greek restaurant that serves Greek cuisine. The taverna is an integral part of Greek culture and has become familiar to people from other countries who visit Greece, as well as through the establishm ...

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

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 Genomics is an interdisciplinary field of biology focusing on the structure, function, evolution, mapping, and editing of genomes. A genome is an organism's complete set of DNA, including all of its genes as well as its hierarchical, three-dim ...

data, and another that supports the annotation of a pattern

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases spa ...

. 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

and EMBL-EBI.

Phase 3

In December 2008, the UK's

approved the team's renewal grant proposal. The grant is for £1.15m and started in January 2009. The members of the myGrid team for Phase 3 are the

and the

University of Southampton , mottoeng = The Heights Yield to Endeavour , type = Public research university , established = 1862 – Hartley Institution1902 – Hartley University College1913 – Southampton University Coll ...

. The project is organised around 4 themes: Knowledge Management for e-Science, Metadata management in e-Laboratories, Scientific Workflow Design, Management and Enactment, and Social Computing for e-Scientists. The Social Computing theme is oriented around the

Virtual research environment (VRE) for the social curation and sharing of scientific Research Objects.

References

{{reflist, 2 Bioinformatics College and university associations and consortia in the United Kingdom Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Grid computing projects Information technology organisations based in the United Kingdom Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester Science and technology in Greater Manchester