e-Science Laboratory

We research and develop tools and techniques designed to help e-Scientists get on with science, and get on with scientists.

Our areas of research include reproducible research, asset curation and preservation, semantic interoperability, knowledge exchange between scientists, and new models of scholarly communication.

Our work aims to support the creation of "e-laboratories" and has been used in domains as diverse as systems biology, social science, astronomy, multimedia and chemistry and adopted by a large number of projects and institutions.

Spotlight: Taverna

Taverna is an open source and domain-independent Workflow Management System – a suite of tools used to design and execute scientific workflows and aid in silico experimentation.

Developed in the e-Science Lab (as part of the myGrid consortium and most recently funded though FP7 projects BioVeL, SCAPE and Wf4Ever) Taverna has recently been accepted as an Apache Incubator project, which means that future releases will developed as part of the Apache process and be called Apache Taverna.

The Taverna tools include the Workbench (desktop client application), the Command Line Tool (for a quick execution of workflows from a terminal), the Server (for remote execution of workflows) and the Player (Web interface plugin for submitting workflows for remote execution).

There are more than 350 organisations around the world, both academic and commercial, that are known to use Taverna.