Bioinformatics data access service in the ProGenGrid system

Abstract

Current bioinformatics workflows require the collection of results coming from different tools on several Web sites. High-throughput services integrated through Web Services allow researchers to access a virtual organization by providing large computational and storage resources. There are considerable costs associated with running a high-throughput application including hardware, storage, maintenance, and bandwidth. Moreover, often such tools use biological data banks heterogeneous in the format and semantic, so the task of enabling their composition and cooperation is even more difficult. Researchers are now taking advantage of economies of scale by building large shared systems for bioinformatics processing. Integrating Computational Grids and Web Services technologies can be a key solution to simplify interaction between bioinformatics tools and biological databases. This paper presents a data access service for retrieving and transferring input data coming from heterogeneous data banks to high throughput applications, wrapped as Web Services. © Springer-Verlag; 2004.