Web Services for Bioinformatics

The University of Chicago's Rick Stevens has published a lengthy but interesting -- even for an outsider -- survey of how the use of web services is picking up in the realms of bioinformatics and computational biology.

It's interesting how books, papers and journals, the traditional open wares of academia and the sciences are slowly being succumbed by first open source scientific applications, and now open data web services.

It is likely that several of the commercial search engine companies (e.g. Google and Microsoft) will explore the issue of coupling biological searches of open literature and databases with computational services with access to commercial tools and databases. These tools will most likely be emerging examples of coupling commercial tools (web services infrastructure, indexing and search technologies) with the best of the open science literature.

Not only do these new web services help the scientific community, but if Google, Microsoft or others (Wikipedia?) pick up on it as Stevens predicts, it will mean a true revolution for any science fair kid with a computer.