BioSWR--semantic web services registry for bioinformatics.

Dmitry Repchevsky,Josep Ll Gelpi

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0107889

Abstract

Despite of the variety of available Web services registries specially aimed at Life Sciences, their scope is usually restricted to a limited set of well-defined types of services. While dedicated registries are generally tied to a particular format, general-purpose ones are more adherent to standards and usually rely on Web Service Definition Language (WSDL). Although WSDL is quite flexible to support common Web services types, its lack of semantic expressiveness led to various initiatives to describe Web services via ontology languages. Nevertheless, WSDL 2.0 descriptions gained a standard representation based on Web Ontology Language (OWL). BioSWR is a novel Web services registry that provides standard Resource Description Framework (RDF) based Web services descriptions along with the traditional WSDL based ones. The registry provides Web-based interface for Web services registration, querying and annotation, and is also accessible programmatically via Representational State Transfer (REST) API or using a SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language. BioSWR server is located at http://inb.bsc.es/BioSWR/and its code is available at https://sourceforge.net/projects/bioswr/under the LGPL license.

Highlights

To the extent that the number of Web services available to the Life Science community is continuously growing, there is a need to provide better ways for their description, categorization and discovery
The most significant advancement of BioSWR is the adoption of Web Service Definition Language (WSDL) 2.0 and its standard OWL-based representation
Semantic representation of Web services allows using SPARQL query language for Web services discovery and annotations and greatly simplifies BioSWR Representational State Transfer (REST) API eliminating a need in respective methods

Summary

Introduction

To the extent that the number of Web services available to the Life Science community is continuously growing, there is a need to provide better ways for their description, categorization and discovery. The need to provide a richer way to describe Web services raised an interest for ontology-based models for Web services description. BioSWR registry is a response to the need to introduce a standard semantic view into Web services in addition to the traditional WSDL-based one. OWL/RDF representation of service definitions allows using SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL) for Web services discovery and annotation, while WSDL-based representation provides a compatibility with existing Web services development tools.

Results

Conclusion