Mark Wilkinson1, Benjamin Good1, Donald Hobern2, Markus Döring3 & Javier de la Torre3
1 Dept. of Medical Genetics, University of British Columbia, Rm. 166, 1081 Burrard St., Vancouver, BC, V6Z 1Y6, Canada
2 Global Biodiversity Information Facility Secretariat, Universitetsparken 15, 2100 København Ø , Denmark
3 Department of Biodiversity Informatics, Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem, Germany
The BioMOBY project tries to solve the problem of interoperability between bioinformatics web services. To do so, it implements a semantic registry for web service discovery. The registry contains a user-extensible ontology that describes the XML data-types used by the web services. Using the new TAPIR protocol it will be relatively easy to make biodiversity data available as BioMOBY services. This will increase the visibility of the biodiversity data globally and, as a result of the BioMOBY architecture, facilitate interoperability with the hundreds of other web services (for example data analysis services) available on the BioMOBY network. At the same time, this integration will immediately enable the use of BioMOBY as an analysis framework for web services within the biodiversity informatics community. We are initiating a proof-of-principle of GBIF/BioMOBY integration by bringing together the GBIF, BioMOBY and Plant Genetic Resources communities around a set of simple use cases.