Data Analysis and Sharing with Web Services

Michael D. Jensen, BS
Timothy B. Patrick, PhD

New life sciences applications and data resources debut on the Internet on a daily basis. As these numbers continue to increase, the lack of organization obfuscates the pool of resources, and scientists are not able to comprehensively locate these resources, automate the use of them, or easily use them in combined ways.

Web Services, a web-based architecture for interoperability between resources with a centralized service registry, brings relief to the most common problems associated with finding, using, and combining online resources. Web Services employ standardized Internet protocols for communication between resources and for automated discovery using centralized registries.

Aims of the tutorial:
  1. Understand what Web Services are and how they aid the scientific community
  2. Learn how life sciences applications and data resources may be implemented as Web Services
  3. Learn to use Web Services for performing a variety of analyses
  4. Learn to build your own Web Service
  5. Understand and learn how integration of Semantic Web resources, like OWL and RDF, can enhance Web Services
During this tutorial we will demonstrate the use of various Web services to analyze data necessary for various experimental studies, discuss the tools and steps necessary for building Web services using the BioMOBY project as an example, and discuss the integration of the Semantic Web with Web Services. Attendees will also benefit from code samples and other resources available by the presenters.

About the Presenters

Michael D. Jensen is a National Library of Medicine fellow in Bioinformatics and a PhD candidate in Biochemistry at the University of Missouri-Columbia. His current research involves characterizing a protein implicated in AlzheimerÕs disease and oxidative stress, development of the Web Services architecture, and the deployment of services relating to biochemical research.

Dr. Timothy B. Patrick is the Associate Director of the Health and Biomedical Informatics Research Training Program at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He teaches courses in controlled terminology and system integration and is currently the Medical Library Association 2004 Donald A. B. Lindberg Research Fellow.

Back to Tutorials Updated: June 28, 2004