BioSStore: A Client Interface for a Repository of Semantically Annotated Bioinformatics Web Services

Bioinformatics has shown itself to be a domain in which Web services are being used extensively. In this domain, simple but real services are being developed. Thus, there are huge repositories of real services available (for example BioMOBY main repository includes more than 1500 services). Besides, bioinformatics repositories usually have active communities using and working on improvements. However, these kinds of repositories do not exploit the full potential of Web services (and SOA, Service Oriented Applications, in general). On the other hand, sophisticated technologies have been proposed to improve SOA, including the annotation on Web services to explicitly describe them. However, these approaches are lacking in repositories with real services. In the work presented here, we address the drawbacks present in bioinformatics services and try to improve the current semantic model by introducing the use of the W3C standard Semantic Annotations for WSDL and XML Schema (SAWSDL) and related proposals (WSMO Lite). This paper focuses on a user interface that takes advantage of a repository of semantically annotated bioinformatics Web services. In this way, we exploit semantics for the discovery of Web services, showing how the use of semantics will improve the user searches. The BioSStore is available at http://biosstore.khaos.uma.es. This portal will contain also future developments of this proposal. TYPE OF PAPER AND