BioHackathon 2008

Towards integrated web service in life science with Open Bio* libraries.

Objectives

-- Standardizing the objects and methods in bioinformatics web services --

The number of web service providers in bioinformatics field is increasing year by year. In theory, these services are interoperable and independent from computer langugages. However, each service uses their own definition of the data types and naming convensions for the methods. Moreover, these services are often not usable by specific languages (partly, due to the lack of compliance of the SOAP/WSDL specification in the langauge's library). This situation prevents these services to be popularized for and used in combination by end users as a infrastructure of the daily research. The BioMOBY project has been tried to overcome the circumstances by defining ontologies for data types and methods used in the services. But the set of data types and methods gathered in BioMOBY looks redundant and complicated to generate typical workflows for end users. Besides, some of the major service providers are not included in the BioMOBY framework yet. In DBCLS, we are trying to develop a new proxy server which translates user's request for the appropriate web service provider. The server will also converts the query and result to the simplified/unified data types, say "50 basic bioinformatics data types" (might be a subset of BioMOBY). Anyway, interoperability can be significantly improved if all Bio* libraries supports them and we just need a practical environment for bioinformatics. 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.

• CallForParticipation
• Objectives
• Objectives_in_Japanese

Venue

• Candidate places:
  1. Tokyo, Japan
  2. Yokohama, Japan
  3. Kyoto, Japan

• Candidate dates:
  1. 2008/02/10-02/16
  2. 2008/01/27-02/02
  3. 2008/02/03-02/09

Attendees

• ListOfAttendies

If you could recommend any appropriate persons from the following groups, please let me know:

• NCBI web service developers
• BioMOBY service developers
• BioPerl?, BioPython?, and BioJava? developers

Starting Points

• TracGuide -- Built-in Documentation
•  The Trac project -- Trac Open Source Project
•  Trac FAQ -- Frequently Asked Questions
• TracSupport -- Trac Support

For a complete list of local wiki pages, see TitleIndex.