Abstract
BackgroundTechnical advances in mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets have produced an extraordinary increase in their use around the world and have become part of our daily lives. The possibility of carrying these devices in a pocket, particularly mobile phones, has enabled ubiquitous access to Internet resources. Furthermore, in the life sciences world there has been a vast proliferation of data types and services that finish as Web Services. This suggests the need for research into mobile clients to deal with life sciences applications for effective usage and exploitation.ResultsAnalysing the current features in existing bioinformatics applications managing Web Services, we have devised, implemented, and deployed an easy-to-use web-based lightweight mobile client. This client is able to browse, select, compose parameters, invoke, and monitor the execution of Web Services stored in catalogues or central repositories. The client is also able to deal with huge amounts of data between external storage mounts. In addition, we also present a validation use case, which illustrates the usage of the application while executing, monitoring, and exploring the results of a registered workflow. The software its available in the Apple Store and Android Market and the source code is publicly available in Github.ConclusionsMobile devices are becoming increasingly important in the scientific world due to their strong potential impact on scientific applications.Bioinformatics should not fall behind this trend. We present an original software client that deals with the intrinsic limitations of such devices and propose different guidelines to provide location-independent access to computational resources in bioinformatics and biomedicine. Its modular design makes it easily expandable with the inclusion of new repositories, tools, types of visualization, etc.
Highlights
Technical advances in mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets have produced an extraordinary increase in their use around the world and have become part of our daily lives
It is commonplace to say that bioinformatics and biomedicine (BIBM) applications are mostly deployed in the Web
The biggest contributors in this setting (e.g. European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) [1], National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) [2], and Spanish Bioinformatics Institute (INB) [3]), offer web access to databases and data analysis applications served by their computing infrastructures via different interfaces
Summary
We present the life cycle of the application and the browsing, composition, execution, and monitoring of a registered workflow. Diving into the mORCA application The power of accessing Web Services via a mobile client is proved by presenting an exercise focused on the execution of a workflow composed of a diverse set of proprietary and third-party services This workflow, which is registered in the BITLAB repository as ‘Homology Search And Phylogenetic Study’, uses a sequence ID to retrieve a sequence from the Uniprot database and produces a dendogram with the similar sequences. The following steps must be performed (the full exercise is provided for demonstration purposes; see Additional file 3): (a) authenticate into the mobile client for privacy purposes; (b) choose the catalogue of services to be used (in this case the BITLAB catalogue); (c) discover the workflow by navigating or searching in the repository. The results of the invocation and the intermediate files, which are stored in the server, can be consulted and retrieved for future use
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