Biodiversity World: a problem-solving environment for analysing biodiversity patterns

In the Biodiversity World (BDW) project we have created a flexible and extensible Web services-based grid environment for biodiversity researchers to solve problems in biodiversity and analyse biodiversity patterns. In this environment, heterogeneous and globally distributed biodiversity-related resources such as data sets and analytical tools are made available to be accessed and assembled by users into workflows to perform complex scientific experiments. One such experiment is bioclimatic modelling of the geographical distribution of individual species using climate variables in order to predict past and future climate-related changes in species distribution. Data sources and analytical tools required for such analysis of species distribution are widely dispersed, available on heterogeneous platforms, present data in different formats and lack interoperability. The BDW system brings all these disparate units together so that the user can combine tools with little thought as to their availability, data formats and interoperability. We describe the architecture of the BDW problem solving environment (PSE) consisting of a number of components providing uniform access to heterogeneous resources and analytical tools. Architectural components of the BDW system include a workflow management tool, resource wrappers, a communications layer, BDW datatypes and a metadata repository.