A service discovery approach in support of Web service integration

Modern biological studies rely on life science Web databases as well as sophisticated Web-based software tools (e.g., homology search tools, modeling and visualization tools). These tools or Web services often have to be combined and integrated in order to support a given study (i.e. an in-silico experiment). The large number of the available Web services makes a service discovery process that can identify the set of services that satisfy a given number of constraints from the pool of all the available Web services crucial. Without such an automated service discovery process the user will have to have a thorough knowledge of all of the existing Web services, a task-which is impractical in the life science domain. In this paper, a scalable approach to service discovery in the biological domain is presented. The approach is based on and guided by a domain ontology.