MAPI: towards the integrated exploitation of bioinformatics Web Services

BMC Bioinformatics

Software

Sergio Ramirez¹  Johan Karlsson²  Oswaldo Trelles³ 

[1] Computer Architecture Department, University of Malaga, Campus de Teatinos, 29071, Málaga, Spain;Computer Architecture Department, University of Malaga, Campus de Teatinos, 29071, Málaga, Spain;Fundación IMABIS, Hospital Carlos Haya, Avda. Carlos Haya (Hospital), 29010, Malaga, Spain;Computer Architecture Department, University of Malaga, Campus de Teatinos, 29071, Málaga, Spain;Instituto Nacional de Bioinformatica;, Melchor Fernández Almagro 6, 28029, Madrid, Spain;

关键词: Configuration File;    Grid Service;    Simple Object Access Protocol;    European Bioinformatics Institute;    Service Invocation;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2105-12-419

 received in 2011-05-17, accepted in 2011-10-27,  发布年份 2011

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundBioinformatics is commonly featured as a well assorted list of available web resources. Although diversity of services is positive in general, the proliferation of tools, their dispersion and heterogeneity complicate the integrated exploitation of such data processing capacity.ResultsTo facilitate the construction of software clients and make integrated use of this variety of tools, we present a modular programmatic application interface (MAPI) that provides the necessary functionality for uniform representation of Web Services metadata descriptors including their management and invocation protocols of the services which they represent. This document describes the main functionality of the framework and how it can be used to facilitate the deployment of new software under a unified structure of bioinformatics Web Services. A notable feature of MAPI is the modular organization of the functionality into different modules associated with specific tasks. This means that only the modules needed for the client have to be installed, and that the module functionality can be extended without the need for re-writing the software client.ConclusionsThe potential utility and versatility of the software library has been demonstrated by the implementation of several currently available clients that cover different aspects of integrated data processing, ranging from service discovery to service invocation with advanced features such as workflows composition and asynchronous services calls to multiple types of Web Services including those registered in repositories (e.g. GRID-based, SOAP, BioMOBY, R-bioconductor, and others).

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Ramirez et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2011. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.