bioMoby - Automated registry and discovery of Web Services



There are still some problems with web services. One problem is simply finding them. They may be out there, but how do we know that they exist, and how to use them? The second problem is knowing what type of input the service expects, and what type of output the service generates. BioMOBY [http://www.biomoby.org/] creates a framework for the automated registration and discovery of web services. One of the most innovative ideas behind BioMOBY is that services are discovered based on the type of data that you are using.



A client program begins by creating an XML description of the data. The description is sent to MOBY Central, which maintains an up to date registry of all MOBY services. MOBY Central returns a list of services that can work on the type of data being sent. The program (or the user) decides which service to call, and invokes that service. The service processes the data and returns the output, again in MOBY-compatible XML. Since both input and output is XML, you can go through many cycles of  analysis using BioMOBY.

Example: BioMoby Web Client [
http://moby.ucalgary.ca/gbrowse_moby]

Note: This browser client is NOT MOBY. It is only a simple interface to MOBY. Anyone can write a client program that uses MOBY.

Using almost any piece of data as a starting point, bioMoby makes it possible for the user to pipeline data from one object to the next. At each step, bioMoby discovers services appropriate to a given type of data, which return a choice of objects for further discovery.

EXAMPLE:
Duck eye lens protein:  delta crystallin 2/ arginosuccinate lyase,
SwissProt accession number P24058


Seed the search with the SwissProt accession number



A long list of matching services are returned that can work with a SwissProt accession number


Retrieve the entry from the UniProt database


Re-initialize the search using the UniProt entry as input


Retrieve ID numbers for protein structures in PDB





http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~frist/Seminars/iims07/iims07.html
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