BioCatalogue: The 'Yellow Pages' of web services

21 Jun 2010

The continuous flow of newly developed web services is of course great news for anyone working in bioinformatics and computational biology. But the overwhelming array of possibilities makes it also hard to identify the web service that suits your needs best. To assist researchers in their search for web services, the group of Carole Goble at the University of Manchester (UK) and the European Bioinformatics Institute have developed BioCatalogue – a common interface for registering, browsing and annotating web services.

One of the co-authors of the BioCatalogue-paper is Marco Roos (Leiden University Medical Centre/University of Amsterdam/NBIC), who acts as a liaison between NBIC and the Goble group. "BioCatalogue offers an overview of web services that are relevant to the life sciences community", Marco explains. "Right now, main sources for BioCatalogue are EMBRACE and Taverna, but as users start registering tools and web services themselves, the scope of BioCatalogue will expand. " He emphasises the role users play in making an interface like BioCatalogue work. "In the end, websites are made by the users. Social community mechanisms are driving the development and the relevance of a website. Your additions, feedback and annotations are important to other users and vice versa."

Feedback
He describes his own role in the project as that of a 'super-user'. "The developers of BioCatalogue are strongly user-oriented. They operate in short development cycles that immediately incorporate user feedback. Working with the different versions of BioCatalogue in my own research, I provided feedback that they used as input for the next development cycle. Pieter Neerincx of the NBIC proteomics platform also contributed feedback as one of the curators." This interactive approach is beneficial for both developers and users, says Marco. "They make the best software, so that we can get the best software."

Taverna plug-in
To increase easy of use, there is no shortage of plans for further development of BioCatalogue. Marco: "I am a Taverna user and we are currently testing a Taverna plug-in that enables you to use BioCatalogue as the search tool within Taverna. What I already like is that the search result presents you with a number of suggestions to explore further." Other plans include a combination of BioCatalogue and MyExperiment, monitoring web services to notify users when changes occur and the possibility to run services in BioCatalogue.

To Archive list