A web services based framework for uniform integration of command-line bioinformatics software tools

Life scientists use a variety of bioinformatics software tools to perform tasks such as annotation of DNA and protein sequences. Most of these tools are command-line driven and handle various data types (nucleotide, protein, etc.) and data formats (Fasta, Genbank, etc.). As many bioinformatics software tools are generally involved in analysis tasks, scientists are more and more requiring that these heterogeneous bioinformatics tools be integrated in a uniform way. They are also requiring graphical user interfaces of these tools, and the ability to compose workflows without much programming effort. IElarbin this paper, we propose a Web services based framework that meets the above requirements.