Table of Contents
Discovering Web Services in the BioCatalogue
The Problem: “Web Services are hard to find…”
So…
- Find the right Web Service using the BioCatalogue
- We offer easy and powerful search and filtering interfaces
- We index metadata made available by service providers, expert curators and the wider community
When searching for services in the BioCatalogue there is an auto suggestion based on the content of the catalogue and previous searches by users. Search terms are case insensitive and can be combined with AND. e.g. Blast AND Protein
In addition, when searching for bioinformatic terms e.g. microarray, the BioCatalogue will automatically include in your search query any related terms e.g. affymetrix, probeset, etc. The myGrid ontology is used to define the relationship between terms.
Search by Data
You can search for services that might analyse or process your data using the search for data feature. For example, given a sequence in fasta format, it returns a list of services that possibly consume sequences in fasta format.
The “Search by data” depends on example inputs and outputs of service operations in BioCatalogue. It is based on the
FileQuirks algorithm.
Service filtering
Web Services in the BioCatalogue can be filtered by:
- Service type: SOAP or REST
- Service category: services are grouped based on their functions.
- Service provider: e.g NCBI, EBI, DDBJ
- Submitter: registries or Members who submitted the service
- Country of Origin: where is the service hosted.
If you enable the tag filter, you can also filter services by:
- Tags on services
- Tags on service operations
- Tags on service inputs
- Tags on service outputs
Note that you can combine different filter. e.g.
