BioFactory: Semantic Integration of Biomedical Data and Applications

Web services have become increasingly important in biomedical research as tools that allow databases and algorithms to be accessed programmatically as computational components in programs. Various biomedical web services differ in their definitions and invocation protocols, as well as their communication and data formats and this presents a barrier to biomedical web service interoperability and integration. In this study, we present Biofactory, a web portal that collects and integrates biomedical web services. Users are able to register/search by semantic computation. The semantic computing and Semantic Description language (SDL) seems ideally suited to help streamline the collection of different biomedical services by providing a common language and a generic format for problem formalization.