Services for Science

I gave a talk on Services for Science (PDF, PPT) at the INGRID 2008 conference in Ischia, Italy, on Wednesday. I decided to do something different and include demonstrations. I think this worked well. I created and deployed a GT4 service using Introduce and gRAVI, and then created and ran a workflow invoking GT4 services using Taverna.  Well, to be honest, there was some steps I skipped along the way (in the style of Julia Childs), but nevertheless I found it impressive how much could be done interactively, in a short time. In summary, I was able to show how we can:

1. Create a new service using the Introduce integrated development environment, defining operations and resource properties, folding in required functionality (e.g., security, notification), and selecting types from both base types and predefined libraries. (Using gRAVI we can also encapsulate executables.)
2. Publish this service into registries (GT4 index services).
3. Discover available services.
4. Compose services into workflows, e.g., via the use of Taverna, which thanks to recent work by Wei Tan and Ravi Madduri (and much help from the Taverna team) can now invoke GT4 services.
5. Deploy and publish the workflow in turn ...