[CAnet - news] Cyber-infrastructure for ecological and environmental projects

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[Excellent article on the use of cyber-infrastructure for ecological and
environmental projects using Kepler workflow.  Some excerpts from GRIDtoday
article -- BSA]



Kepler Speeds SDSC's Workflow Automation

The advent of the worldwide web has brought a new world of data, tools, and
online services within the reach of scientists. By helping organize and
automate scientific tasks, Kepler lets scientists take full advantage of
today's complex software and Web services.

Kepler is named after the Ptolemy software from UC Berkeley on which it is
built, and the new tool is part of the emerging cyberinfrastructure, or
integrated technologies for doing today's science. The open-source Kepler
project grew out of the need for an analytical workflow tool in the Science
Environment for Ecological Knowledge (SEEK) project.

"With Kepler, scientists from many disciplines can automate complex
workflows, without having to become expert programmers," said Bertram
Ludäscher, one of the initiators of the Kepler project and an SDSC Fellow
and associate professor of Computer Science at UC Davis. 

"With Kepler, we're giving scientists an intuitive tool that they can use to
build their own workflows" said Kepler co-initiator Matt Jones, a
co-principal investigator and project manager for the SEEK project. "And in
order to build a workflow environment that is effective across multiple
domains of science, we're working with a growing range of projects to ensure
the widest possible usefulness of the infrastructure."

To advance genomic research, biologists in SciDAC Program at the DOE study
co-regulated genes. In their research, they try to identify promoters and
develop models of transcription factor binding sites that play key roles in
the expression of genes. The scientists use Kepler to help execute a series
of data analysis and querying steps in which they move the results of each
successive step from one Web resource to another. By automating these steps,
the researchers save hours or days of time, speeding their results and
allowing them to undertake problems on larger scales than previously
possible.

Ecologists in the SEEK project study problems that include invasive diseases
such the West Nile virus. West Nile virus is spread through mosquitos
feeding on migrating birds in a complex dual-vector process. The researchers
develop predictions for where and how fast this kind of disease will spread.
To do this, ecologists access online data sets about where the mosquitoes
and birds are observed to live and migrate. Then they use web-based
ecological niche modeling tools to correlate this information with climate
data, computing predictions for where the birds and mosquitos are likely to
be found.

Automating these steps with Kepler can make it feasible to produce accurate
predictions for the spread of an invasive disease far more quickly than
previously possible. Automating workflows can yield similar benefits in a
wide range of other scientific fields, and a growing number of projects and
individuals are contributing to the Kepler open source projectURL: Kepler
Scientific Workflow Project - <http://kepler-project.org/> 

 


 


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