mORCA: ubiquitous access to life science web services.

Area of Science:

• Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
• Mobile Computing in Science

Background:

• Mobile devices like smartphones and tablets are increasingly prevalent, offering ubiquitous internet access.
• The life sciences generate vast amounts of data and services, many available as Web Services.
• There is a growing need for mobile solutions to effectively utilize these life sciences applications.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a user-friendly, lightweight mobile client for accessing bioinformatics Web Services.
• To address the challenges of mobile device limitations in handling scientific data and applications.
• To facilitate location-independent access to computational resources in bioinformatics and biomedicine.

Main Methods:

• Designed, implemented, and deployed a web-based mobile client.
• The client supports browsing, parameter composition, invocation, and monitoring of Web Services.
• Demonstrated functionality with a validation use case involving a registered workflow.

Main Results:

• An easy-to-use, lightweight mobile client for bioinformatics Web Services has been successfully deployed.
• The client effectively handles large datasets and manages workflow execution and monitoring.
• The software is available on major app stores, with source code accessible on GitHub.

Conclusions:

• Mobile devices offer significant potential for scientific applications in bioinformatics.
• The developed client overcomes intrinsic mobile device limitations for bioinformatics tasks.
• Its modular design allows for future expansion with new tools and data repositories.