service, which provides a blast report, appears on the list and the service parameters interface appears when selected, allowing users to execute the service directly using the previously created objects. The service param- eter interface is endowed with traditional user-friendly capabilities, such as a list of the more recently used objects, default values for parameters, on-the-ﬂy object creation, automatic naming of output objects, etc. Execution progress can be traced using the ‘user task’ tab (Figure 1D and F), and the new object will be avail- able in the ‘user objects’ tab after reloading the page. The output from runNCBIBlastp1 can be viewed (Figure 1D and E) and further analysed using pipelining capabilities to call getBestHitsFromBlast service in order to extract identiﬁers from the best hits of the BLAST report. It is noteworthy to observe that an alternative process could be started by retrieving a sequence from its ID, using, for instance, the seqID to return the ‘Sequence’. This model can be named single-input/single-output service. When this kind of service is invoked using a col- lection (multiple-input) of sequence IDs, MOWServ is able to split the collection into individual items, call the services and compose the results again. In this way, the output from getBestHitsFromBlast (a collection), can be used to execute getAminoAcidsSequenceCollection service that invokes getAminoAcidSequence service as many times as sequences are in the collection. The result will be a collection of AminoAcidSequences. Similarity among the sequences gathered in the object can be calculated with the runClustalwFastUMA service that produces a coloured sequence alignment that could be sent to the runCreateTreeFromClustal service in order to group the sequences on the basis of their phylogenetic relationship. DISCUSSION BioMoby (17,13) is emerging as the standard of fact for data exchange and web services inter-communication in bioinformatics. MOWServ is a BioMoby-based web client that enables the secure and integrated analysis of data and straightforward access to databases, services and computational resources. Originally endowed with authentication mechanisms, task tracking, automatic and uniform generation of services interfaces, it has been extended with a new formal registry procedure, improved ontology and data edition capabilities, new search tools, error handling, scheduling and asynchronism service invocation. Therefore, traditionally limited CPU-power available at wet-labs has been enhanced by linking together a set of scattered instruments into a single virtual infrastructure, in order to foster more eﬀective and productive research. The registry procedure aims to guarantee the quality and availability of the services. The controlled registration reduces the risk of broken links, becomes fault-tolerant and oﬀers a homogeneous view of the services and docu- mentation on oﬀer, independently of the status of Nucleic Acids Research, 2010, Vol. 38, Web Server issue W675 particular servers. The new ontology oﬀers a more intui- tive organization of data types and web services with more nodes and less redundancy, since duplicated objects that populate ancient BioMoby ontologies no longer exist. The new advanced search tool based on Magallanes (20) has been integrated into the MOWServ to facilitate the ﬁnding data types and services in the ontology using an eﬃcient algorithm based on inexact matches. The BioMoby API has been extended with asynchronism, error handling and mirroring capabilities both to cope with long-CPU services and to drive executions among the diﬀerent servers that contain mirrored services. Using asynchronism, clients can retrieve status or results of in- dividual jobs without waiting for the entire service invo- cation to ﬁnish thus avoiding frequent time-outs in web connections. Much of the functionality of the MOWServ is also available in a desktop-based application developed by our group called jOrca (22). SUPPLEMENTARY DATA Supplementary Data are available at NAR Online. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The authors would like to thank all the other nodes in the INB infrastructure for their close involvement in the de- velopment of the services and integration procedures. FUNDING The National Institute for Bioinformatics, a platform of the Genoma-Espan˜ a Foundation; the European Union co-funded project ‘Advancing Clinico-Genomic Trials on Cancer’ (contract-026996); Red de Investigacio´ n de Reacciones Adversas a Alergenos y Fa´ rmacos – Redes Tematicas de Investigacio´ n Cooperativa Sanitaria (RIFAAF – RETICS RD07/0064/0017); Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacio´ n, proyecto I+D AGL2009-12139- C02-02; Universidad Pablo de Olavide (CABD-CSIC/ JA/UPO). Conﬂict of interest statement. None declared. REFERENCES 1. Gasteiger,E., Gattiker,A., Hoogland,C., Ivanyi,I., Appel,R.D. and Bairoch,A. (2003) Expasy: the proteomics server for in-depth protein knowledge and analysis. Nucleic Acids Res., 31, 3784–3788. 2. Basu,M.K. (2001) Sewer: a customizable and integrated dynamic html interface to bioinformatics services. Bioinformatics, 17, 577–578. 3. Rost,B., Yachdav,G. and Liu,J. (2004) The predictprotein server. Nucleic Acids Res., 32, W321–W326. 4. 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