SOAP/WAD-Based Web Services for Biomedicine

Abstract

Information on biomedical data has increased exponentially in the recent years. In consequence, publicly available data of various types are dispersed across a large number of web-based repositories that are dedicated to specific research issues. Additionally, increasing access to this biomedical information has given rise to numerous developments of advanced methods and tools in the field of computational biology. Web service technology has been developed in order to allow a direct and automated access to those distributed data resources and tools. Web services are software systems that support the communication and interoperability between machines independent of computer platforms or computer languages; the transfer of biological data using SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) in combination with the Web Service Description Language (WSDL) is one of the major standards in the bioinformatics community. The combination of distributed web services is used to generate even complex workflows that are able to address the increasingly complex questions of biomedical research. The purpose of this review is to introduce to SOAP/WSDL-based web services and to demonstrate their usage, from both the provider’s and the user’s perspectives. We introduce the basic standards and technology, describe the combination of web services into workflows, present use cases of web services and workflows related to health care and describe the utility of web services for biomedicine.