Discovery and Classification of Bioinformatics Web Services

摘要

The transition of the World Wide Web from a paradigm of static Web pages to one of dynamic Web services provides new and exciting opportunities for bioinformatics with respect to data dissemination, transformation, and integration. However, the rapid growth of bioinformatics services, coupled with non-standardized interfaces, diminish the potential that these Web services offer. To face this challenge, we examine the notion of a Web service class that defines the functionality provided by a collection of interfaces. These descriptions are an integral part of a larger framework that can be used to discover, classify, and wrapWeb services automatically. We discuss how this framework can be used in the context of the proliferation of sites offering BLAST sequence alignment services for specialized data sets.