title: BioCatalogue: a universal catalogue of web services for the life sciences.
abstract: The use of Web Services to enable programmatic access to on-line bioinformatics is becoming increasingly important in the Life Sciences. However, their number, distribution and the variable quality of their documentation can make their discovery and subsequent use difficult. A Web Services registry with information on available services will help to bring together service providers and their users. The BioCatalogue (http://www.biocatalogue.org/) provides a common interface for registering, browsing and annotating Web Services to the Life Science community. Services in the BioCatalogue can be described and searched in multiple ways based upon their technical types, bioinformatics categories, user tags, service providers or data inputs and outputs. They are also subject to constant monitoring, allowing the identification of service problems and changes and the filtering-out of unavailable or unreliable resources. The system is accessible via a human-readable 'Web 2.0'-style interface and a programmatic Web Service interface. The BioCatalogue follows a community approach in which all services can be registered, browsed and incrementally documented with annotations by any member of the scientific community.
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK.
authors.forename: Jiten
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Bhagat
authors.forename: Franck
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Tanoh
authors.forename: Eric
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Nzuobontane
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Laurent
authors.forename: Jerzy
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Orlowski
authors.forename: Marco
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Roos
authors.forename: Katy
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Wolstencroft
authors.forename: Sergejs
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Aleksejevs
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Stevens
authors.forename: Steve
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Pettifer
authors.forename: Rodrigo
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Lopez
authors.forename: Carole A
authors.initials: CA
authors.lastname: Goble
mesh_terms: D001690:Biological Science Disciplines; D002377:Catalogs as Topic; D019295:Computational Biology; D020407:Internet; D012984:Software; D014584:User-Computer Interface