Seahawk: moving beyond HTML in Web-based bioinformatics analysis

Background: Traditional HTML interfaces for input to and output from Bioinformatics analysis on the Web are highly variable in style, content and data formats. Combining multiple analyses can therfore be an onerous task for biologists. Semantic Web Services allow automated discovery of conceptual links between remote data analysis servers. A shared data ontology and service discovery/execution framework is particularly attractive in Bioinformatics, where data and services are often both disparate and distributed. Instead of biologists copying, pasting and reformatting data between various Web sites, Semantic Web Service protocols such as MOBY-S hold out the promise of seamlessly integrating multi-step analysis. Results: We have developed a program (Seahawk) that allows biologists to intuitively and seamlessly chain together Web Services using a data-centric, rather than the customary servicecentric approach. The approach is illustrated with a ferredoxin mutation analysis. Seahawk conc...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Paul M. K. Gordon, Christoph W. Sensen
• Keywords: Analysis, Biologists, BMCBI 2007, Semantic Web Service