Service-oriented architecture for integration of bioinformatic data and applications

Service oriented architecture (SOA) is a new paradigm that originated in industry for future distributed computing. It is recognized as a promising architecture for application integration inside and across organizations. Since their introduction, semantic web and web services technologies are increasingly gaining interest in the implementation of e-Science infrastructures. In this dissertation, we survey current research trends and challenges for adopting SOA in general. We present a practical experiment of building a service-oriented system for data integration and analysis using current web services technologies and bioinformatics middleware. The system is enhanced with an ontological model for semantics annotation of services and data. It demonstrates that adopting SOA in the e-Science field can accelerate the scientific research process. A new methodology and an enhanced system design is proposed to facilitate the reuse of workflows and verified knowledge.