Web Services for Bioinformatics

Abad Shah (University of Engineering and Technology, Pakistan), Zafar Singhera (Oracle Corporation, USA), and Syed Ahsan (University of Engineering and Technology, Pakistan)
Copyright: © 2011 |Pages: 46
EISBN13: 9781609606442|DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-015-0.ch003
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Abstract

A large number of tools are available to Bioinformaticians to analyze the rapidly growing databanks of molecular biological data. These databanks represent complex biological systems and in order to understand them, it is often necessary to link many disparate data sets and use more than one analysis tool. However, owing to the lack of standards for data sets and the interfaces of the tools this is not a trivial task. Over the past few years, web services has become a popular way of sharing the data and tools distributed over the web and used by different researchers all over the globe. In this chapter we discuss the interoperability problem of databanks and tools and how web services are being used to try to solve it. These efforts have resulted in the evolution of web services tools from HTML/web form-based tools not suited for automatic workflow generation to advances in Semantic Web and Ontologies that have revolutionized the role of semantics. Also included is a discussion on two extensively used Web Service systems for Life Sciences, myGrid and Semantic-MOBY. In the end we discuss how the state-of-art research and technological development in Semantic Web, Ontology and Database Management can help address these issues.
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