Service-Oriented Digital Libraries: A Web Services Approach

In bioinformatics experiments related to in silico modelling, huge sets of data at different physical scales, and frequently from different scientific laboratories, are created. Likewise, the data processing algorithms being used have been developed by researchers in different institutions; some are newly created, some have been in use for a long time. It remains a huge challenge to share and manage these data and algorithms on the Internet. It can be valuable to build a digital library infrastructure which allows clinicians and researchers not only to preserve, trace and share data resources, but also to collaborate at the data processing level. This paper presents a Web Services approach within the LHDL project, which allows medical data in differing formats to be made compatible by being stored in a standard form and also exposes key algorithms from existing applications as online service objects for sharing and validating.