Site Announcement: Google Summer of Code Taverna projects

Hello everybody,

The Apache Software Foundation has been accepted as a mentoring organization for the 2015 Google Summer of Code. The full list of Apache GSOC projects includes four Taverna-related projects : a production-suitable command line tool, a databundle viewer, OGC WPS support and an Android App for Taverna.

A production-suitable command line tool

This proposed GSOC project is to formalize the command line interface for Taverna Language so that it can achieve some of the below:

• In collaboration with dev@taverna and the mentor, define command line options for workflow conversions and inspection
• Find and use an appropriate command line parser library
• --help
• Basic error handling (e.g. file not found)
• Batch processing - e.g. recursive conversions
• Arguments for choosing input and output formats
• Unit and Integration Tests for the above (ideally through Maven)

The project can be extended by exposing other parts of the API that don't currently have a command line equivalent, e.g.

• Workflow validation
• Workflow statistics (number of processors, links, etc)

A databundle viewer

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This GSOC project proposes to create a web-based presentation (but not edit) of a workflow run, e.g. the following user story:

1. User uploads the databundle file for a workflow run (or provides the URI to one existing elsewhere) into the presentation system
2. The presentation system shows basic information about the workflow run
3. User navigates to inputs/outputs
4. The presentation system presents a list of inputs or outputs - embedding images etc. where possible, download links for large files, inline for small text, etc
5. User downloads a selected data file

Metadata provided can be presented in many different ways, for instance:

• Which workflow was executed?
• Which steps were executed?
• What step produced this value?
• What values were produced by this step?
• What steps used this value?

OGC WPS support

This proposed GSOC project is to, in collaboration with dev@taverna and the mentor

• Improve/complete the existing Taverna 2.5 WPS prototype support
  • Discovery of WPS services from a user-specified WPS server
  • Configuration of WPS services
  • Execution of WPS services
• Test WPS support using pre-selected WPS servers and services
• Migrate the WPS support to the Taverna 3 codebase
• Document the Taverna 3 WPS service support

An Android App for Taverna

The project would be to:

Extend and complete Taverna Mobile: an Android app to run Taverna workflows available on myExperiment using Taverna Server.

1. fix the ssl/https parts and use the latest version of taverna server
2. update the code to remove some legacy dependencies and use the latest APIs
3. improve the UI and responsiveness

Joining in

If you, or any students you know, are interested in these or any other Taverna projects, then please discuss ideas on the Taverna developers' list dev@taverna.incubator.apache.org and then submit proposals to Google by 27th March. More information is in the GSOC 2015 FAQ

Alan