Interoperable and Easy-to-Use Web Services for the Bioinformatics Community - A Case Study

In the field of bioinformatics, there exists a large number of web service providers and many competing standards regarding how data should be represented and interfaced. However, these web services are often hard to use for a non-expert programmer and it can be especially hard to see how different services can be used together to create scientific workflows. In this paper we have performed a literature study to identify problems involved in developing interoperable web services for the bioinformatics community and steps taken by other projects to, at least in part, address them. We have also conducted a case study by developing our own bioinformatic web service to further investigate these problems.