Neetu Jabalia1, Hina Bansal1, VV Rahul2, Nidhee Chaudhary1, Alka Grover1, Jitendra Narayan3
1Amity Institute of Biotechnology, Amity University, Noida, India.
2National Brain Research Centre, Deemed University, India.
3Aberystwyth University, United Kingdom.
ABSTRACT
Studies of dynamically and rapidly evolving nature of the research inflicted the bioinformatics community to make the web-resources in a cross-integrated mode to increase the access, retrieval, security and openness of dataset and tools. In recent years, web services have become a promising solution because of its advanced features such as language and platform independence, liberating from maintenance of biological databases and tools, scalability of computational resources and high-level application programming interface. A web service designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network such as NCBI, EBI, DDBJ, and KEGG implemented services to access their data. As the biological data is growing, many databases are providing web service based interface. Some commonly used web services are: REST (Representational State Transfer), a very lightweight service that allow for simple implementation and works by binding methods with service to HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) operations; SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), an Extensible Markup Language specification for message based transaction and network. Other systems interaction with a web service is by its description using SOAP messages conveyed using HTTP with XML inconjuction with other web-related standard; WSDL (Web Service Description Language), a well defined XML specification that describes service in sufficient detail and can be invoked by the reader of the file; XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol), a powerful protocol which correlates existing technologies for online services in bioinformatics and JABAWS (Java Bioinformatics Analysis Web Services) is used for multiple sequence alignment. The mass genetic information generated from human genome projects can be significantly used only by a ‘Semantic Web service’ that cross integrate the bioinformatics resources. In this paper we have discussed how different bioinformatics data and tools are implementing various web services approaches and providing the desired biological information. Read more…
