Towards interoperable bioinformatics web services for integrated applications

"The generation of unprecedented amounts of genomic-scale data on a daily basis has created an awareness of the need for more effective interaction between biological researchers and the bioinformatics tools they use. A comprehensive report from the 2nd Database Center for Lifescience (DCBLS) BioHackathon, held in March 2009, was published last month in Journal of Biomedical Semantics. At this meeting, software developers and genome biologists were brought together to discuss issues regarding incomplete interoperability between individual data and analytical tools. The ultimate goal of the meeting was to collaboratively evaluate the feasibility of addressing real-world biological problems by utilizing web services to create data “mashups” with existing tools in the hope of developing stable and usable research platforms...."