BioSWR--semantic web services registry for bioinformatics

Dmitry Repchevsky; Josep Ll Gelpi

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0107889

BioSWR--semantic web services registry for bioinformatics

PLoS One. 2014 Sep 18;9(9):e107889. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0107889. eCollection 2014.

Authors

Dmitry Repchevsky¹, Josep Ll Gelpi²

Affiliations

¹ Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Life-Sciences Department, National Institute of Bioinformatics, Computational Bioinformatics Node, Barcelona, Spain.
² Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Life-Sciences Department, National Institute of Bioinformatics, Computational Bioinformatics Node, Barcelona, Spain; Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain.

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.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Computational Biology*
Database Management Systems
Databases, Factual
Terminology as Topic
User-Computer Interface

Grants and funding

GN6-BSC. National Institute of Bioinformatics. Instituto de Salud Carlos III. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.