Web Service management system for bioinformatics research: a case study

In this paper, we present a case study of the design and development of a Web Service management system for bioinformatics research. The described system is a prototype that provides a complete solution to manage the entire life cycle of Web Services in bioinformatics domain, which include semantic service description, service discovery, service selection, service composition, service execution, and service result presentation. A challenging issue we encountered is to provide the system capability to assist users to select the “right” service based on not only functionality but also properties such as reliability, performance, and analysis quality. As a solution, we used both bioinformatics and service ontology to provide these two types of service descriptions. A service selection algorithm based on skyline query algorithm is proposed to provide users with a short list of candidates of the “best” service. The evaluation results demonstrate the efficiency and scalability of the service selection algorithm. Finally, the important lessons we learned are summarized, and remaining challenging issues are discussed as possible future research directions.