Abhishek Tiwari:SOAP/WSDL based webservices for Biological Databases

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Using SOAP/WSDL to access the Biological Databases

Intoduction

SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) (http://www.w3.org/TR/soap) based Web Services technology (http://www.w3.org/ws) has gained much attention as an open standard enabling interoperability among applications across heterogeneous architectures and different networks. When large amounts of data need to be retrieved and analysed, this often proves to be tedious and impractical. Today, biological databases are large collections of data that are relatively difficult to maintain outside the centres and institutions that produce them. These data are traditionally accessed using browser-based World Wide Web interfaces. When large amounts of data need to be retrieved and analysed, this often proves to be tedious and impractical. Web Services technology enables scientists to access these data and analysis applications as if they were installed on their laboratory computers. Similarly, it enables programmers to build complex applications without the need to install and maintain the databases and analysis tools (1) and without having to take on the financial overheads that accompany these. Moreover, Web Services provide easier integration and interoperability between bioinformatics applications and the data they require.

Work Flow

Web Services uses SOAP (the Simple Object Access Protocol) over HTTP. It interacts with other systems using messages based on Xtensible Markup Language (XML) (http://www.w3.org/XML). A SOAP message can be transferred using almost any application or transport protocol. SOAP uses the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) (http://www.w3.org/TR/wsdl) to describe its interface. A SOAP client can read the WSDL at runtime and dynamically select the proper data-encoding scheme and network transfer protocol. SOAP implementations are available for many programming languages, including Perl and Java, which are popular languages among bioinformaticians.