| | 8 | |
| | 9 | The number of web service providers in bioinformatics field is increasing year by year. |
| | 10 | In theory, these services are interoperable and independent from computer langugages. |
| | 11 | However, each service uses their own definition of the data types and naming convensions for the methods. |
| | 12 | Moreover, these services are often not usable by the specific languages |
| | 13 | (partly, due to the lack of compliance of the SOAP/WSDL specification in the langauge's library). |
| | 14 | This situation prevents these services to be popularized for and used in combination by end users as a infrastructure of the daily research. |
| | 15 | The BioMOBY project has been tried to overcome the circumstances by defining ontologies for data types and methods used in the services. |
| | 16 | But the set of data types and methods gathered in BioMOBY are redundant and complicated to generate typical workflows for end users. |
| | 17 | Besides, some of the major service providers are not included yet. |
| | 18 | Thus, we believe gathering all web service providers and Open Bio* library developers to disucuss about the standardization of objects and methods among web services and programming languages must benefit usability and interoperability for the life science in the next era. |
