BioMOBY successfully integrates distributed heterogeneous bioinformatics Web services. The PlaNet exemplar case

The burden of noninteroperability between on- line genomic resources is increasingly the rate- limiting step in large- scale genomic analysis. BioMOBY is a biological Web Service interoperability initiative that began as a retreat of representatives from the model organism database community in September, 2001. Its long- term goal is to provide a simple, extensible platform through which the myriad of on- line biological databases and analytical tools can offer their information and analytical services in a fully automated and interoperable way. Of the two branches of the larger BioMOBY project, the Web Services branch ( MOBY- S) has now been deployed over several dozen data sources worldwide, revealing some significant observations about the nature of the integrative biology problem; in particular, that Web Service interoperability in the domain of bioinformatics is, unexpectedly, largely a syntactic rather than a semantic problem. That is to say, interoperability between bioinformatics Web Services can be largely achieved simply by specifying the data structures being passed between the services ( syntax) even without rich specification of what those data structures mean ( semantics). Thus, one barrier of the integrative problem has been overcome with a surprisingly simple solution. Here, we present a nontechnical overview of the critical components that give rise to the interoperable behaviors seen in MOBY- S and discuss an exemplar case, the PlaNet consortium, where MOBY- S has been deployed to integrate the on- line plant genome databases and analytical services provided by a European consortium of databases and data service providers.