Biosphere: the interoperation of web services in microarray cluster analysis.

Unlabelled: The growing use of DNA microarrays in biomedical research has led to the proliferation of analysis tools. These software programs address different aspects of analysis (e.g.

A web services choreography scenario for interoperating bioinformatics applications.

Background: Very often genome-wide data analysis requires the interoperation of multiple databases and analytic tools. A large number of genome databases and bioinformatics applications are available through the web, but it is difficult to automate interoperation because: 1) the platforms on which the applications run are heterogeneous, 2) their web interface is not machine-friendly, 3) they use a non-standard format for data input and output, 4) they do not exploit standards to define application interface and message exchange, and 5) existing protocols for remote messaging are often not firewall-friendly. To overcome these issues, web services have emerged as a standard XML-based model for message exchange between heterogeneous applications.