What is Taverna about?
The best way to understand what Taverna is about and what it could potentially do for you is to use it, however, a quick read of the background information section might be useful if you are not familiar with the idea of workflows in bioinformatics. Effectively Taverna allows a biologist or bioinformatician with limited computing background and limited technical resources and support to construct highly complex analyses over public and private data and computational resources, all from a standard PC, UNIX box or Apple computer. The screenshot below shows the workbench in action running an example workflow.
Who are we?
Taverna is a collaboration between the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), IT Innovation , the School of Computer Science, University of Newcastle, Newcastle Centre for Life , School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester and the Nottingham University Mixed Reality Lab . Additional development effort has come from the Biomoby project , Seqhound , Biomart and various individuals across the planet. Development is coordinated through the facilities generously provided by SourceForge.net and predominantly driven by the requirements of biologists in the UK life science community.
Taverna development is lead by Tom Oinn at the EBI with the main development team at the University of Manchester and funded through the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute UK (OMII-UK) myGrid node.
System requirements
Taverna will happily run on any modern PC or Mac, running any recent version of Windows, Linux, OSX and most UNIX like operating systems (we can‘t test them all but we believe it should work). As long as your computer has a network connection and can run Java version 5 you should be fine. There are no databases or analysis applications to install as these are all accessed over the network.
