The life science community is among the first adopters of Web Services. Taverna, a workflow workbench that is popular within the life science community - and which was jointly developed by computer scientists at The University of Manchester - provides access to over 3,500 Web Services that can be composed by scientists for constructing and enacting their in silico experiments.

But one of the main issues that hinders the wide adoption and use of Web Services is the difficulty in locating those that perform the analysis the scientist is interested in.

With Biocatalogue, Web Services are annotated by expert curators, service providers and by the wider Community using tags, rating, comments and ontologies. Automated mining and monitoring tools are also used.

The project has been led by Prof Carole Goble at The University of Manchester and Rodrigo Lopez at EMBL EBI.

Other contributors include Khalid Belhajjame, Franck Tanoh, Jiten Bhagat, Katy Wolstencroft and Robert Stevens from The University of Manchester and Eric Nzuobontane, Hamish McWilliam and Thomas Laurent from EMBL EBI.

The project is been funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).

manchester.ac/