Towards integration of web services into agents for biological information resources

Abstract

Through integration of Web services into agents, we can obtain enhanced functionality and credibility. If agents could access and use Web services, the agents might offer them to other agents as extended services. Additionally, if Web service clients and servers could access and use agent services, agent developers would be able to offer the benefits of agent services to a Web service environment. In this paper, we propose Agent Service to Web Service Gateway as a means for increasing availability and usefulness of legacy biological information resources. Specifically, we illustrates as an example Protein Data Base(PDB), which is one of the most important resources for structural proteomics research. We explain the agentification of PDB using a wrapper and then describe how to provide the corresponding Web service through the service gateway in detail. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.