Leveraging REST Web services and their semantic extensions for bioinformatic workflows

Abstract

The field of bioinformatics involves analysis of large sets of data. This might entail leveraging of tools scattered over many Web sites. To provide the experimental biologists with a common platform capable of such analysis, this thesis focuses on extending a bioinformatics framework with Web service invocation support. Galaxy being substantially popular for its analysis tools and workflow management capability seemed like an ideal candidate to extend. This thesis proposes adding REST Web service support to Galaxy in a way that can be easily extended to SOAP Web services in the future. Also, it introduces an approach to add dynamic tools to Galaxy. To simplify the process of repetitive analyses on different sets of data, in this thesis we discuss enabling Web service invocation in the workflow portion of Galaxy. Also this thesis shows how we can leverage semantic annotations in Web services to improve the user‟s experience when interacting with Web services.