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Biological SOAP servers and web services provided by the public sequence data bank
1Center for Information Biology and DNA Data Bank of Japan, National Institute of Genetics, 1111 Yata, Mishima, Shizuoka 411-8540, Japan. hsugawar@genes.nig.uc.jp
Nucleic Acids Research
|June 26, 2003
Summary
Biological data integration is challenging due to difficulties in programmatically accessing online resources. We developed SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) web services to enable easier data access and integration for researchers.
Area of Science:
- Bioinformatics
- Computational Biology
- Data Science
Background:
- Online biological data resources (databases, analytical tools) are accessible via the internet and World Wide Web (WWW).
- While web server output is browsable, programmatic access for data integration is difficult, hindering research.
- Integrating distributed, heterogeneous biological data resources presents a significant challenge.
Purpose of the Study:
- To address the limitations of programmatic access to online biological data resources.
- To develop a solution for seamless integration of distributed and heterogeneous data.
- To provide a program-friendly interface for biological data resource interaction.
Main Methods:
- Implementation of a SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) server.
- Development of web services offering a program-friendly interface.
- Deployment of web services at http://www.xml.nig.ac.jp/ for accessibility.
Main Results:
- A SOAP server and associated web services have been successfully implemented.
- The developed web services provide a program-friendly interface for accessing biological data.
- This facilitates overcoming the obstacles in integrating distributed heterogeneous data resources.
Conclusions:
- The implemented SOAP web services offer a viable solution for programmatic access to biological data.
- These services significantly improve the integration of distributed and heterogeneous biological data resources.
- Researchers can now more easily develop programs to query and process data from various online biological resources.
