Web Services 4 Life Sciences: A Curated Catalogue of Life Science Web Services

WS4LS is an initiative aimed at providing easy access to a catalogue of Web Services relevant to the life science communities. Web Services are defined by the W3C as a software system designed to enable machine to machine interoperability over a network. However, the discovery of Web Services is today quite a difficult task for bench scientists whom do not have the time or means to endeavor in the informatics related to these. Web Services are poorly described. WS4LS intends to provide easy, human accessible content documenting Web Services by extensive use of service ontologies through which it will be trivial to discover a function or operation, as required by the end user. Until recently, laboratories had to invest locally in the implementation and maintenance of bioinformatic tools and databases to carry out both day to day as well as complex tasks. WS4LS addresses the 'where and how' of Web Services for scientists and exposes how to build these into local analytical pipelines. WS4LS will also provide the means for creating communities that will share knowledge and enhance scientific interactions at various levels. WS4LS e-scientists communities will complement existing efforts and generate a Google-like Coop [http://www.google.com/coop/].

The Catalogue will have one common Web interface, hosting portals to advanced curation and discovery tools. The look and feel will be 'Web 2.0'; that is, of an online social community (a la FaceBook), social sharing and tagging site (a ls Flickr or Connotea) and shop (a la Amazon or Ebay), similar to Web Services List but more user friendly. For curation and acquisition, we intend to couple a traditionally 'exclusive' curated resource for high quality annotation and discovery, with a modern participatory online community approach inspired by social community sites, and shopping sites for browsing and recommendations. By these means we aim to ease improve the sustainability of the catalogue, make it more relevant, and give the community 'ownership' in the catalogue. Past evidence suggest that moderators and good citizenship practices will emerge, who can contribute to the moderation pipeline of the official curator. For discovery, we intend to couple the traditional 'form-filling' search mechanisms (like the Feta Discovery Service) with a modern facet-based 'shopping' style web interface like /facet [?] or Amazon and a social network web site with blogs, discussion forums, tags, shared bookmarks, recommendations and ratings etc; and a Google-style interface. For tool developers and service providers, we intend to serve them with quality, machine-level, annotations from the expert curators that they can use for automated service matching, for example [?]. We will provide them with APIs to incorporate the Catalogue into their tools and workbenches; a special upload annotation environment and access to services for migrating applications to be Web Services.