Taverna Mobile: Taverna workflows on Android
This addresses the need for mobile workflow access for scientists on the move, but it is incremental as it adapts an existing desktop tool to a mobile platform without major innovations.
The paper tackled the problem of limited access to scientific workflows for mobile researchers by developing Taverna Mobile, an Android app that allows browsing, executing, and monitoring workflows, enabling tasks like locating workflows at conferences or rerunning jobs with new data.
Researchers are often on the move, say at conferences or projects meetings, and as workflows are becoming ubiquitous in the scientific process, having access to scientific workflows from a mobile device would be a significant advantage. We therefore have developed Taverna Mobile, an application for Android phones which allows browsing of existing workflows, executing them, and reviewing the results. Taverna Mobile does not aim to reproduce the full experience of building workflows in the Taverna Workbench, rather it focuses on tasks we have deemed relevant to a scientist that is not at her desk. For instance, when visiting a conference she might hear about someone's workflow, which she can quickly locate and mark for later exploration. When in the biology lab, faced with updated scientific data, the scientist can rerun her own workflow with new inputs. While commuting, she can monitor the status of a long-running job.