Bio Search Computing: Bioinformatics web service integration for data-driven answering of complex Life Science questions

An increasing number of bioinformatics web services are available that provide answer to specific data extraction and analysis needs. Yet, biomedical questions are often complex and regard many different aspects of an organism and its biomolecular entities. Their answer hence requires searching multiple heterogeneous data that frequently are inherently ordered, or are associated with ranked confidence values. Search Computing has been proposed to support the integration of web services, in particular but not only search services, in order to answer complex questions by combining data extracted from distinct sources, ordered based on local rankings, into result combinations, with an associated global ranking, which represents the solution of the complex query. This paper presents how bioinformatics web service can be described in the search computing framework and integrated analyses over such services can be carried out. A set of bioinformatics services has been described and registered in the search computing framework and a bioinformatics search computing (Bio-SeCo) application using these services has been created. This current prototype application, the available services which it uses, the queries which are supported, the kind of interaction which is therefore made available to the users, and the future scenarios are here described and discussed