Abstract
The burden of noninteroperability between on-line genomic resources
is increasingly the rate-limiting step in large-scale genomic analysis.
BioMOBY is a biological Web Service interoperability initiative that
began as a retreat of representatives from the model organism database
community in September, 2001. Its long-term goal is to provide a
simple, extensible platform through which the myriad of on-line biological
databases and analytical tools can offer their information and analytical
services in a fully automated and interoperable way. Of the two branches
of the larger BioMOBY project, the Web Services branch (MOBY-S) has
now been deployed over several dozen data sources worldwide, revealing
some significant observations about the nature of the integrative
biology problem; in particular, that Web Service interoperability
in the domain of bioinformatics is, unexpectedly, largely a syntactic
rather than a semantic problem. That is to say, interoperability
between bioinformatics Web Services can be largely achieved simply
by specifying the data structures being passed between the services
(syntax) even without rich specification of what those data structures
mean (semantics). Thus, one barrier of the integrative problem has
been overcome with a surprisingly simple solution. Here, we present
a nontechnical overview of the critical components that give rise
to the interoperable behaviors seen in MOBY-S and discuss an exemplar
case, the PlaNet consortium, where MOBY-S has been deployed to integrate
the on-line plant genome databases and analytical services provided
by a European consortium of databases and data service providers.
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