Problem

The biosciences research domain is characterized by high-throughput data, diverse computational and analysis tools. The critical issue in biosciences research is the need to integrate share and complement the efforts of research groups around the world. This will ensure that resources expended by one research group to develop tools and techniques have maximum utilization by the worldwide community of researchers. Researchers need to access papers, presentations and other publications of a research group for reference. The ability to search coherently, with minimum time latency, is required for ease of knowledge sharing.

Solution

A pertinent platform, a Web portal, "Stargate" with Web services underpinnings, as a gateway to the plethora of resources developed by biosciences research projects. This will afford the worldwide research community access, not only to the experimental data, but also various available tools. Web services are a platform independent framework to develop, deploy and integrate applications accessible via the World Wide Web. These Web services inherit the accessibility and flexibility features of all Web-based applications. Tools exposed as Web services can not only be invoked by users, independent of underlying platform constraints, but can also be integrated to form Web processes. Web processes, composed of multiple Web services, perform a task by utilizing the functionalities of each of the constituent Web services in a seamless manner.

The portal will also provide a systematic interface for searching the research group's papers, presentations or posters by author-name, year-of-publication, publication-media or topic. This is a client-server architecture based component with a form based interface front-end and a UDDI registry and database back-end. This will enable researchers to locate relevant publications as fast as possible; if it is not available, the researcher can redirect his search efforts to another research group.

Another component of the portal is a Semantic BiOlogical Web SErvices Registry "SemBOWSER", to register all relevant Web services in the biosciences domain. SemBOWSER will be a single point reference for all Web service searches by users of this research community. In addition SemBOWSER will also enable new Web service providers to publish their Web services.

Also provided is the functionality of a forum or discussion board for the research group. This will enable project personnel to post questions, messages, schedule meetings, upload files or post other relevant resources. This will not only provide an easy to use, intuitive platform for communication among the project personnel, but also create a resource store (papers, posters or presentations).