The University of Manchester and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) have launched a new e-science resource for biologists - Biocatalogue.org. A centralised registry of curated life science web services, Biocatalogue.org was officially launched at the 17th Annual International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology and the 8th European Conference on Computational Biology conference (ISMB-ECCB 2009) in Stockholm.
The service allows researchers to discover, annotate, register and use biological web-based services. Biocatalogue.org currently has around 1,000 biological Web Services - and more and more will be registered and annotated by services providers, curators and users on a daily basis. Services are monitored by automated mechanisms and by the user community for their availability and reliability. In addition to providing the means to programmatically access life science tools and databases over the Internet, the facility acts as a place where researchers can contact and meet the experts and maintainers of these services.
Web services have gained a momentum as a means for packaging existing data and computational resources in a form that is amenable for use and composition by third party applications. The life science community is among the first adopters of Web Services.
One of the main issues that hinders the wide adoption and use of Web Services is the difficulty in locating those that perform the analysis the scientist is interested in.
The project, led by Prof Carole Goble at The University of Manchester and Rodrigo Lopezat EMBL EBI, is funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).
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