MyExperiment

Draft

Introduction

The myExperiment Virtual Research Environment enables people to share digital items associated with your research — in particular it enables you to share and execute scientific workflows. “myExperiment is a collaborative environment where scientists can safely publish their workflows and experiment plans, share them with groups and find those of others. Workflows, other digital objects and bundles (called Packs) can now be swapped, sorted and searched like photos and videos on the Web. Unlike Facebook or MySpace, myExperiment fully understands the needs of the researcher and makes it really easy for the next generation of scientists to contribute to a pool of scientific methods, build communities and form relationships - reducing time-to-experiment, sharing expertise and avoiding reinvention. myExperiment is now the largest public repository of scientific workflows.” myexperiment Wiki, retrieved 13:06, 14 June 2010 (UTC)).

myExperiment is led by a joint team from the universities of Southampton and Manchester in the UK, led by David De Roure and Carole Goble, and is funded by JISC under the Virtual Research Environments programme and by Microsoft's Technical Computing Initiative.

Architecture

Support for workflows

The myexperiment.org social web site supports multiple workflow systems, including:

• Taverna Workflow Workbench (part of the The myGrid Project). Specific support is provided for Taverna (T1 and T2) workflows for which the system displays relevant metadata, components and visual previews, that are retrieved directly from workflow files.
• Trident
• Support for Mandre is planned

Packs

Packs are used to create collections of related resources - these can include both internal myExperiment resources (like workflow, files and other packs) and links to externally available items. Descriptions can be set up for the pack in general and for each item independently, helping users to find resources that are relevant to them. (implemented with as Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange ?).

APIs

myExperiment supports several APIs:

• A RESTful API
• RDF API
• SPARQL Endpoint

Software/download

• The portal software itself is writting in Ruby on Rails and is also available RubyForge, in case you plan creating your own environment...

Links and references

Web sites

• myexperiment.org
• myExperiment Wiki

Articles

• David De Roure, "e-Science and the Web," Computer, vol. 43, no. 5, pp. 90-93, May 2010, doi:10.1109/MC.2010.133 (Access restricted).

• Goble, C.A., Bhagat, J., Aleksejevs, S., Cruickshank, D., Michaelides, D., Newman, D., Borkum, M., Bechhofer, S., Roos, M., Li, P., and De Roure, D.: myExperiment: a repository and social network for the sharing of bioinformatics workflows, Nucl. Acids Res., 2010. doi:10.1093/nar/gkq429