1. Why the BioCatalogue?
While biologists and Bioinformaticians find the use of web services critical for their work, they also encounter a number of difficulties associated with the current state of many services and the access to these services. These problems include:
- lack of a centralised resources that comprehensively catalogues life science web services thereby making these web services hard to find
- the poor documentation or the lack of documentation for many existing web services thereby making them hard to use
- lack of effort to improve the quality and coverage of the documentation of these services which means that the documentation if it exist is often out of sync with the current state of the service
- lack of information on the quality of services like their availability and reliability
The BioCatalogue is aiming to solve the above-mentioned issues by providing a curated and comprehensive catalogue of biological web services. BioCatalogue will provide a quality of service standard for biological web services thereby enabling services to be classified and checked for availability, reliability and other quality measures. It also aims to provide a platform with several (standardized) interfaces and a suite of tools for registration of services by the community of users as well as empower the community to extend and enhance the system.
2. Is the BioCatalogue free?
Yes. The BioCatalogue is an open source project. You can submit, annotate and search for services in BioCatalogue for free. Please read our terms of use for information and guidance. The BioCatalogue source code is also free under the BSD License.
3. Are the APIs available?
Yes, find them here
4. What are you working on at the moment?
The BioCatalogue team is working on service monitoring, the BioCatalogue API, service curation improvement, final merge of the EMBRACE registry. Have a look a our roadmap to see what we'll be working on in the coming months.
5. How do I cite the BioCatalogue?
Bhagat, J., Tanoh, F., Nzuobontane, E., Laurent, T., Orlowski, J., Roos, M., Wolstencroft, K., Aleksejevs, S., Stevens, R., Pettifer, S., Lopez, R., Goble, C.A.: BioCatalogue: a universal catalogue of web services for the life sciences, Nucl. Acids Res., 2010. doi:10.1093/nar/gkq394
6. How can I contact you?
The BioCatalogue is a user driven project. If you would like to be kept informed about the developement of the project please join our friend list. For bugs report, feedback or feature request email us: contact@biocatalogue.org
7. What type of Web service do you support?
Currently we support SOAP (WSDL type) web services, REST web services, Soaplab services. Better support for BioMoby and DAS service is coming soon.
8. What is the relation between the BioCatalogue and Embrace registry?
The BioCatalogue will merge with the Embrace registry. The first public release of the BioCatalogue have harvested all the content of the Embrace registry. Subsequent releases will include all the information and capabilities of the EMBRACE service registry.
9. I cannot find a service category to assign my Web Service to
Contact us: contact@biocatalogue.org . We are continuously reviewing the BioCatalogue web service categories based on users' feedback.
