[Myexperiment-discuss] Biocatalogue launched

[David De Roure]

I'm pleased to announce that the Biocatalogue life science Web Services 
registry was launched at ISMB in Stockholm yesterday - see 
http://www.manchester.ac.uk/aboutus/news/display/?id=4835 (or below).

Biocatalogue has a symbiotic relationship with myExperiment (at many levels!) 
and the services will share functionality later this year to provide benefits 
for all our users.

-- Dave

New e-science service could accelerate cancer research
01 Jul 2009

The University of Manchester and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's 
European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) have launched a major new 
e-science resource for biologists - which could accelerate research into 
treatments for H1N1 flu and cancer.

Biocatalogue.org, a centralised registry of curated life science Web Services, 
is being officially launched today (Wednesday 1 July) at the 17th Annual 
International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology and the 
8th European Conference on Computational Biology conference (ISMB-ECCB 2009) in 
Stockholm.

This type of systematic access has the potential to significantly accelerate 
the work of researchers in the medical, agronomical and pharmaceutical fields. 
The service allows researchers to discover, annotate, register and use 
biological web-based services.

Biocatalogue.org already has around 1,000 biological Web Services - and more 
and more will be registered and annotated by services providers, curators and 
users on a daily basis.

Services are monitored by automated mechanisms and by the user community for 
their availability and reliability. A simple traffic light system displays the 
current status of a Web Service.

In addition to providing the means to programmatically access life science 
tools and databases over the Internet, the facility acts as a place where 
researchers can contact and meet the experts and maintainers of these services.

Web services have gained a momentum as a means for packaging existing data and 
computational resources in a form that is amenable for use and composition by 
third party applications.

The life science community is among the first adopters of Web Services. 
Taverna, a workflow workbench that is popular within the life science community 
- and which was jointly developed by computer scientists at The University of 
Manchester - provides access to over 3,500 Web Services that can be composed by 
scientists for constructing and enacting their in silico experiments.

But one of the main issues that hinders the wide adoption and use of Web 
Services is the difficulty in locating those that perform the analysis the 
scientist is interested in.

With Biocatalogue.org, Web Services are annotated by expert curators, service 
providers and by the wider Community using tags, rating, comments and 
ontologies. Automated mining and monitoring tools are also used.

The project has been led by Prof Carole Goble at The University of Manchester 
and Rodrigo Lopezat EMBL EBI.

Other contributors include Khalid Belhajjame,Franck Tanoh, Jiten Bhagat, Katy 
Wolstencroft and Robert Stevens from The University of Manchester and Eric 
Nzuobontane, Hamish McWilliam and Thomas Laurent from EMBL EBI.

The project is been funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences 
Research Council (BBSRC).

Notes for editors

BioCatalogue leverages from existing registry such as BioMoby and seekda. 
BioCatalogue will merge with the Embrace registry

For more information on Biocatalogue.org, please contact:

Prof Carole Goble address@hidden

Rodrigo Lopez address@hidden

About The University of Manchester

The University of Manchester is Britain's largest single-site university with a 
proud history of achievement and an ambitious agenda for the future. It is a 
member of the Russell Group, was ranked with the elite group of research 
universities traditionally formed by the triangle of Oxford, Cambridge and 
London in the recent Research Assessment Exercise 2008. Its external research 
income is £263 million.

About the European Bioinformatics Institute

The European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) is part of the European Molecular 
Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and is located on the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus in 
Hinxton near Cambridge (UK). The EBI grew out of EMBL's pioneering work in 
providing public biological databases to the research community. It hosts some 
of the world's most important collections of biological data, including DNA 
sequences (EMBL-Bank), protein sequences (UniProt), animal genomes (Ensembl), 
three-dimensional structures (the Macromolecular Structure Database), data from 
microarray experiments (ArrayExpress), protein-protein interactions (IntAct) 
and pathway information (Reactome). The EBI hosts several research groups and 
its scientists continually develop new tools for the biocomputing community.