Adding semantics to the discovery of Web services in life sciences

Abstract

Research in the Life Sciences largely depends on the integration of large, distributed and heterogeneous data sources and web services. Due to the large number of available web services, the sheer complexity of the data and the frequent lack of documentation, discovering the most appropriate web service for a given task is a challenge for the user. In this paper we propose a semi-automatic approach, based on semantic techniques, to assist researchers in the discovery and selection of the most appropriate web services to fulfill a set of given requirements. We describe the overall framework of our approach, and the usefulness of our techniques is demonstrated through a Bioinformatics case study. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.