Introduction to Web services MSc on Bioinformatics for Health Sciences May 2006 Arnaud Kerhornou Iván Párraga García INB

Introduction Provide a resource to a user. This resource is universally available through the web.

Web services in bioinformatics These resources in Bioinformatics are generally: Retrieval of biological data (e.g. a sequence entry from EMBL database) Sequence homology searches: Blast service to find sequence homologues for your sequence of interest More generally any Bioinformatics analysis tool: a gene prediction tool etc. Conversion between data formats

Current situation in bioinformatics

Limits of current web services implementation Discovery Service description Ontologies Data transfert Automation

Solution A new framework for providing Web resources that lies on the following Technology standards: A message-based communication protocol, SOAP A language to formally represent the input/output data, XML A service description language, WSDL A discovery system, UDDI Use of ontologies to formalize the domains of knowledge associated with bioinformatics Web services.

Next generation framework PublishFind Bind Service registry Service Provider Service Descriptions Service Description Service WDSL, UDDI WSDL, UDDI A web service is an interface that describes a collection of operations that are network accessible through standardized XML messaging Service Requestor

Application: Workflow A workflow can be defined as a control flow and data flow of services. Within the data flow, services outputs of previously executed services are used as inputs to following services. One can implement its own computational analysis as an orchestrated execution of web services.

Implementation: The Biomoby framework