The University of Manchester (UNIMAN) is the largest single-site university in the UK, with research strength across all scientific disciplines. Since 2001, the e-Science Lab in the School of Computer Science have been influential in the development and research in scientific workflow systems, collaborative eScience technologies, semantic and linked data technologies and platforms for reproducible research - developing tools and resources designed for data-driven and computational research. The group pioneered scientific workflow R&D, developing the influential open source Apache Taverna workflow management system and co- developed the W3C PROV standard for provenance collection. In the EU project Wf4Ever the group pioneered the development of Research Objects (http://wwww.researchobject.org) as a mechanism for packaging reproducible workflows with metadata, provenance and portable research components; this model formed the basis for the community-developed Common Workflow Language, which UNIMAN is supporting through its work with the EU BioExcel Centre of Excellence, ESFRI ELIXIR, the NIH Data Commons and the US Food and Drug Administration where it is a keystone of the BioCompute Object specification. ELIXIR is the data infrastructure for Life Sciences in Europe counting 23 countries as members, each with their national node.

UNIMAN have a history of building asset sharing and collaboration platforms for scientists, notably myExperiment, the first public web-based workflow sharing resource. UNIMAN is leading the development of the workflow registry for the EOSC Life cluster project’s workflow collaboratory (13 RIs in the Life Sciences) and the science workflow platform for the Synthesys+ project, a pillar of the DISSCo ESFRI. UNIMAN lead the FAIRDOM consortium (fair-dom.org), a pan-national partnership to develop and support a Commons for the stewardship and exchange of data, models, workflows, samples and laboratory SOPs for Systems and Synthetic Biology projects. The FAIRDOM-SEEK platform is the basis of the FAIRDOMHub (fairdomhub.org), a public service, supports 130 registered projects, and has been adopted by over 50 other projects for independent installation. The FAIRDOM project supports EU ERANet programmes, EU ESFRI ISBE (Infrastructure for Systems Biology Europe) data management pillar and forms the basis of the IBISBA1.0 asset management platform IBISBAHub. It is also used as the basis for facility management by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in the USA as well as the UK Synthetic Biology Centres in Manchester and Edinburgh. The FAIRDOM SEEK platform is the basis of a Common Data Management Toolkit for 6 ELIXIR Nodes and their national data management provision. UNIMAN are founding partners of the UK’s Software Sustainability Institute, beneficiary of the EOSCpilot project, working on Data Catalogue interoperability and a member of the ELIXIR-UK Node – they are members of the ELIXIR Microbial Biotechnology Community, the Bioschemas and CWL activities and lead the Identifiers WG.


Key Persons Involved