The Human Genome Project has generated massive amounts of data at research facilities around the world. As new Internet technologies continue to emerge, it is obvious that Web Services can make genomics data easier to find and share. Thus, we propose a framework for creating, publishing, and using genomics services over the web that is extensible and scalable.

We will discuss how we have taken the existing genomics tool BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) and converted it into a Web Service. This service is employed by a Java client-side application, which implements a psi-BLAST algorithm that uses information gathered from Medline to determine whether a particular gene is further searched iteratively.

The system is built on the Web-communications standard SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), which communicates via XML (Extensible Markup Language), a feature that we exploit because it makes genomics computation flexible and scalable. Furthermore, we utilize the WSDL (Web Services Description Language) and the UDDI protocol (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) for a simple and updateable way to find our service.

We propose this framework as a possible standard for Web-distributed genomics services because of its robustness, maintainability, and scalability.