Introduction to Web services

1
Introduction to Web services
Arnaud KerhornouIván Párraga García INB
MSc on Bioinformatics for Health Sciences May
2006
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Introduction
Provide a resource to a user. This resource is
universally available through the web.
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Web services in bioinformatics

• These resources in Bioinformatics are generally
• Retrieval of biological data (e.g. a sequence
  entry from EMBL database)
• Sequence homology searches Blast service to find
  sequence homologues for your sequence of interest
• More generally any Bioinformatics analysis tool
  a gene prediction tool etc.
• Conversion between data formats

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Current situation inbioinformatics
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Limits of current webservices implementation

• Discovery
• Service description
• Ontologies
• Data transfert
• Automation

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Solution

• A new framework for providing Web resources that
  lies on the following Technology standards
• A message-based communication protocol, SOAP
• A language to formally represent the input/output
  data, XML
• A service description language, WSDL
• A discovery system, UDDI
• Use of ontologies to formalize the domains of
  knowledge associated with bioinformatics Web
  services.

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Next generationframework
Service Descriptions
Service registry
Publish
Find
WDSL, UDDI
WSDL, UDDI
Service Description
Bind
Service
Service Provider
Service Requestor

• A web service is an interface that describes a
  collection of operations that are network
  accessible through standardized XML messaging

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Application Workflow

• A workflow can be defined as a control flow and
  data flow of services.
• Within the data flow, services outputs of
  previously executed services are used as inputs
  to following services.
• One can implement its own computational analysis
  as an orchestrated execution of web services.

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Implementation The Biomoby framework