This document discusses how workflows can help biologists by allowing them to combine various computational tools and databases. It notes that individual biologists have limited time and computational skills, but can use workflows to access various expertises and resources. Workflows allow biologists to design complex computational experiments and analyze large amounts of data by connecting different services and applications in an automated, repeatable process.
1. Feasting on Brains
with Taverna and myExperiment
Marco Roos, Katy Wolstencroft
acknowledging
Carole Goble, Dave de Roure, Alan Williams, Jiten Bhagat, Martijn
Schuemie, Edgar Meij, Sophia Katrenko, Willem van Hage, M. Scott
Marshall, Pieter Adriaans, NBIC, OMII-UK, the myGrid team
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2. Why should a biologist be interested in workflows?
Leiden Students Say…
•…
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7. Thousands of
Databases
Low & High Throughput
Proteomics, Genomics, Transcriptomics,
Protein sequence prediction, Phenotypic
studies, Phylogeny, Sequence analysis,
Protein Structure prediction, Protein-
protein interaction, Metabolomics, Model
organism collections, Systems Biology,
Epidemiology, etcetera …
All with a splendid interface
… all different, of course
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8. Biomedical knowledge repository
PubMed statistics
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez
>20 million citations
>400,000 added/year
~70,000 searches/month
…
Does not
compute
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10. A typical biologist…
Lots of data
to deal with
Tiny brain
Lots of knowledge
to deal with
Lots of methods No
and algorithms to try computational
and combine superpowers
A needy biologist
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11. Start at the beginning
I have a
computationa
l question…
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