Introduction to Taverna Online and Interaction service Aleksandra Pawlik University of Manchester

 In order to run Taverna workflows you don’t have to have the Taverna Workbench installed  Taverna Workflows can be run through the BioVel Portal which  Workflows can be run remotely  No client (Workbench or Command Line Tool) is required  Your workflows can be run by people who do not have access to any of the Taverna clients  Running workflows is helpful for demonstration purposes

 Go to  You can run Taverna Workflows as a guest user but if you want to upload your own workflows you must create an account  For the purpose of this tutorial we are using because it contains some already uploaded workflows. However, as you will see on the site the current version is

Select “Workflows”

 In the listed workflows find “Blast_Align_And_Tree”  You can see the description, inputs, outputs and the statistics for running the workflow

 In order to run the workflow do select “Create Run”  (Please try not to run this workflow all at the same time!)  You have to provide your address (even if you are logged in)  You can use the example values or upload a file with your own input values (which may be consistent with the input specified for the given workflow)  Click “Start run”  Sometimes it may take a few minutes to run the workflow on the Portal

 The results can be browsed on the BioVel website or downloaded  You can see the past workflow runs (if you’re logged in) by selecting “Runs”

 Go to onlinehpc.com and register as a new user  To create a new workflow select “Workflows” -> “New Workflow” and provide its title (for example “Hello Workflow”)

 Drag and drop “Script” and then click “Properties”  We get a similar window for configuring the script, just like in the Taverna Workbench  We can specify input and output ports as well as parallelization, the number of retries and loops

 We need to add output and input ports  For the input select Utility components and Constant  For the output select External ports and Result  We will write a very simple script  out = “Hello “ + in;

 To specify the input we need to click on “Properties” (enter “John” or whatever name you like)  To run the workflow click “Launch” at the top  We need to provide the title for the workflow and we can see the results

 Many workflows need user interaction  A workflow on a server does not need to be “press a button and wait”  Taverna Interaction Service  Users interact with a workflow (wherever it is running) in a web browser.  Interaction Service Plug-in in workbench

 We will build a simple workflow to demonstrate how Interaction Services work  Add “ask” service from Interaction services

 Add a string constant to the “message” port of the ask service with value “Hello, what is your name?”  Connect the ask output with an output port and run the workflow  You should see a website form where you can answer the question  Provide the answer and click “Submit”. Then go back to Taverna

 You should see your answer in the output port  We can now connect this output with another local service  Add “Concatenate two strings” and add the string value as an input for the port “string 1”

 This is a very simple example but on the BioVel Portal you can run a much more complex workflow which uses the interaction service  Go to the BioVel Portal and look for Generic ENM workflow with interaction (