BioCatalogue: A Curated Web Service Registry For The Life Science Community

Abstract

Abstract Web Services have gained a momentum as a means for packaging existing data and computational resources in a form that is amenable for use and composition by third party applications. The life science community is certainly among the first adopters of Web Services. For example, "Taverna":http://www.mygrid.org.uk, a workflow workbench that is popular within the life science community, provides access to over 3500 thousands web services that can be composed by scientists for constructing and enacting their in silico experiments. However, one of the main issues that hinders the wide adoption and use of Web Services is the difficulty in locating the “appropriate” Web Service, i.e., the Web Service that performs the analysis the scientist is interested in. The descriptions of available Web Services are often poor providing little information to the scientist about their usefulness for the analysis s/he is after. With the above issues in mind, the authors have recently initiated the BioCatalogue project ("http://www.biocatalogue.org/":http://www.biocatalogue.org/). BioCatalogue provides a central registry of curated biological Web Services. A place where providers, users and expert curators can register, annotate and search for Web Services. It also acts as a place where the community can contact and meet the experts and maintainers of these services. The project is co-developed by the University of Manchester and the EMBL-EBI.