Download National e-Science Centre The Bioinformatics and DAIT Project (BioDA)

National
e-Science
Centre
The Bioinformatics and DAIT Project (BioDA)
Workshop
e-Science Institute 8th December 2004
The workshop was organised by the BioDA project with partial funding provided by BBSRC. The
aim of the workshop was to bring together architects and infrastructure developers from the
bioinformatics community and the DAIT project to examine the community’s needs for data
access and integration (DAI) on the grid and to explore the application of OGSA-DAI, a DAI
middleware being developed by the DAIT project.
The day was divided into project presentations and themed discussion sessions. Presentations
by the participating bioinformatics projects demonstrated diverse DAI requirements, ranging from
mining protein data from distributed sources (eHTPX), harvesting information from autonomous
data sources via screen scraping (BDWorld) to manipulating structured text files for protein
analyses (GeneGRID). Presentations by DAIT, GeneGRID and myGRID (OGSA-DQP) also
demonstrated how OGSA-DAI could be applied and extended. During the discussion sessions,
participants focussed on their specific experiences in using OGSA-DAI, as well as their concerns
and requirements for OGSA-DAI.
Knowledge gained at the workshop helped inform potential users of OGSA-DAI’s capabilities,
contribute to BioDA’s task to evaluate OGSA-DAI and also to provide feedbacks to the DAIT
project.
Presentations and notes from the discussion sessions are available on the BioDA website
(http://isegserv.itd.rl.ac.uk/BioDA).
Alex Gray, Brian Matthews, Andrew Jones, Richard White, Shirley Crompton