Irfan Habib

Ashiq Anjum, Peter Bloodsworth, Andrew Branson et al.

We outline the approach being developed in the neuGRID project to use provenance management techniques for the purposes of capturing and preserving the provenance data that emerges in the specification and execution of workflows in biomedical analyses. In the neuGRID project a provenance service has been designed and implemented that is intended to capture, store, retrieve and reconstruct the workflow information needed to facilitate users in conducting user analyses. We describe the architecture of the neuGRID provenance service and discuss how the CRISTAL system from CERN is being adapted to address the requirements of the project and then consider how a generalised approach for provenance management could emerge for more generic application to the (Health)Grid community.

Ashiq Anjum, Peter Bloodsworth, Irfan Habib et al.

By abstracting Grid middleware specific considerations from clinical research applications, re-usable services should be developed that will provide generic functionality aimed specifically at medical applications. In the scope of the neuGRID project, generic services are being designed and developed which will be applied to satisfy the requirements of neuroscientists. These services will bring together sources of data and computing elements into a single view as far as applications are concerned, making it possible to cope with centralised, distributed or hybrid data and provide native support for common medical file formats. Services will include querying, provenance, portal, anonymization and pipeline services together with a 'glueing' service for connection to Grid services. Thus lower-level services will hide the peculiarities of any specific Grid technology from upper layers, provide application independence and will enable the selection of 'fit-for-purpose' infrastructures. This paper outlines the design strategy being followed in neuGRID using the glueing and pipeline services as examples.