Web servicing the biological office.
Biologists routinely use Microsoft Office applications for standard analysis tasks. Despite ubiquitous internet resources, information needed for everyday work is often not directly and seamlessly available. Here we describe a very simple and easily extendable mechanism using Web Services to enrich standard MS Office applications with internet resources. We demonstrate its capabilities by providing a Web-based thesaurus for biological objects, which maps names to database identifiers and vice versa via an appropriate synonym list. The client application ProTag makes these features available in MS Office applications using Smart Tags and Add-Ins.


BACKGROUND
http://services.bio.ifi.lmu.de/prothesaurus/
Szugat
Martin
M
Department of Informatics, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, München, Germany. prothesaurus@bio.ifi.lmu.de
Güttler
Daniel
D
Fundel
Katrin
K
Sohler
Florian
F
Zimmer
Ralf
R
D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods*; D003628:Database Management Systems; D016208:Databases, Factual; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods; D020407:Internet; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D009626:Terminology as Topic; D014584:User-Computer Interface; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled; D015443:Word Processing / Q000379:methods*