Annual Scientific Report 2015

Reporting on usage
We further developed our log analytical capabilities
to accommodate the broad adoption of Elastic
Search, Logstash and Kibana (ELKs) for the
interactive visualisation of live servers and for general
improvements in usage. We use this technology
to visualise web statistics, EBI Search usage, Job
Dispatcher and live web server behaviour, and to
generate the graphical summaries of usage provided in
this Report.
Outreach, training and support
In 2015 the Technical Services Cluster consolidated
helpdesk activities, optimising our feedback and
development pipelines and empowering other teams
to handle their own support requests more efficiently.
Our team handled approximately 700 tickets, the bulk
of which were concerned with programmatic access to
tools, search and data acquisition, best practices and
training.
We participated in 14 outreach and training events, both
in the context of the EMBL-EBI Training Programme
and independently at external conferences and
workshops. Our trainers provided overviews of how best
to access EMBL-EBI resources to a range of audiences,
and took part in more specialised training such as
tools and techniques for sequence manipulation and
searching, multiple sequence alignment and using Web
Service APIs.
Future plans
During During 2016 we will focus on two major
strands of work: improving the EBI Search interface,
and improving the exposure of mappings between
different data resources. To improve usability and
the discoverability of data, we will analyse the usage
Rodrigo Lopez
Web Production
MSc Veterinary Medicine, Oslo
Veterinaerhoyskole, 1984. MSc Molecular
Biology and Toxicology and Informatics,
University of Oslo, 1987.
At EMBL-EBI since 1995.
patterns associated with query types and develop
a RESTful client to replace the existing web user
interface. This work will involve close collaboration
with user experience designers in the Web Development
team.
We will further improve interoperability between
EMBL-EBI services and the EBI Search, and enhance
data logistics to keep up with data growth. We will do
this in the context of projects led by Pfam, InterPro,
UniProt, ENA and EnsemblGenomes teams. We
will continue to phase out obsolete services (e.g.
FingerPRINTScan, PROSITE Scan) and launch more
scientifically relevant ones.
Security is paramount to all our operations. Our
web administrators will deploy the most up-to-date
intrusion-detection tools and, based on industry best
practices, enhance the security of EMBL-EBI web
services. We will also adopt hybrid Cloud technologies to
enable flexibility and provide a broader range of services
to EMBL-EBI service teams and research groups.
We will contribute to the deliverables of the ELIXIR
Excelerate programme, for example by establishing
standard service metrics and refining the ELIXIR tool
and database registry.
Selected publications
Li W, Cowley A, Uludag M, et al. (2015) The EMBL-EBI
bioinformatics web and programmatic tools framework.
Nucleic Acids Res 43:w580-w584
Squizzato S, Park YM, Buso N, et al. (2015) The
EBI Search engine: providing search and retrieval
functionality for biological data from EMBL-EBI.
Nucleic Acids Res 43:w585-w588
Jobs run on the Dispatcher framework, 2009 through
2015. In 2015 we ran more than 151 million jobs,
helping users establish analytical pipelines to query
data and combine it with their own. The average
number of jobs per month was 12.6 million (compare to
9.2 million in 2014).
2015 EMBL-EBI Annual Scientific Report 156