A semantic service environment: A case study in bioinformatics

Abstract

In recent years, web services have become increasingly important components of the scientific methodology of certain domains. Currently, however, the description and use of most these is purely 'syntactic'; that is, the semantics of the services are left to the human user to infer or acquire by other means before deciding whether and how to use a service. Consequently, there are opportunities to bridge this semantic gap through the application of emerging semantic web and semantic web service technologies in these domains, thereby enriching and expanding a user's service interactions. This paper presents its authors' experiences of the application and use of these emerging technologies in a displicine in which web services already play a key role: bioinformatics. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.