Toward an OpenSocial Life Science Gateway

To enable the Life Science community to fully use TeraGrid resources for computing and data management, we developed an integrated cyber computational environment named the Open Life Science Gateway. Based on a service-oriented framework, the gateway aggregates a group of bioinformatics applications and data collections into a Web portal. Furthermore, this gateway provides a platform for life science researchers to collaboratively conduct bioinformatics computing, building their communities and sharing data and workflows. In the era of Web 2.0, gadgets such as iGoogle gadgets are becoming increasingly popular for integration and customization of Web contents from different sources. Social networking is also gaining attention because it has created powerful new ways to build virtual communities in a bottom-up manner. Google's OpenSocial framework standardizes the practices of both gadget programming and online social networking, enabling Web developers to write social gadgets that can run in any OpenSocial-compliant container. These new Web technologies can leverage science gateway portals in terms of rich user interface and social network capability, which will promote the adoption of science gateways for advanced education purpose. This paper introduces the Open Life Science Gateway service-oriented framework and describes our efforts to develop OpenSocial gadgets for running bioinformatics analysis tools on the TeraGrid resources. The gadgets can be deployed in OpenSocial containers such as the iGoogle Sandbox and Apache Shindig. With these gadgets, biologists and biology students can easily run their analysis programs and browse outputs through social Web sites.