WS-BioZard: A Wizard for Composing Bioinformatics Web Services

As the amount of biological data continues to increase, how biologists share data and analysis tools efficiently is becoming an important issue. Web service technology is a promising solution because of the advanced features it provides such as language independence, platform independence and ease of programmatic access. Recently, we have seen an increasing amount of interest in the composition of biological Web services in order to process a biological task. Although there are some research efforts towards composing biological Web services, such as BioMoby and Taverna, these existing tools are still too difficult to be widely used by the average biologist. Therefore, lowering the learning curve for Web service composition to make it easier for biologists is becoming a critical need. In this paper, we describe WS-BioZard, a comprehensive framework for addressing this need by using wizards and semantics to provide a suite of tools that support practical semi-automatic composition of Web services in the biological domain.