Published online 4 June 2010 Nucleic Acids Research, 2010, Vol. 38, Web Server issue W671–W676 doi:10.1093/nar/gkq497 MOWServ: a web client for integration of bioinformatic resources Sergio Ram´ırez1, Antonio Mu n˜oz-Me´ rida 1 , Johan Karlsson 1 , Maximiliano Garcı´a1, Antonio J. P e´rez-Pulido2, M. Gonzalo Claros3 and Oswaldo Trelles1,* 1Departamento Arquitectura de Computadores, Escuela Te´ cnica Superior de Ingenier´ıa Informa´ tica, Universidad de Ma´ laga, Ma´ laga, 2Centro Andaluz de Biologı´a del Desarrollo (CSIC-UPO), Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Sevilla and 3Departamento de Biologı´a Molecular y Bioquı´mica, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de Ma´ laga, Ma´ laga, Spain Received February 5, 2010; Revised May 12, 2010; Accepted May 18, 2010 ABSTRACT The productivity of any scientist is affected by cum- bersome, tedious and time-consuming tasks that try to make the heterogeneous web services compat- ible so that they can be useful in their research. MOWServ, the bioinformatic platform offered by the Spanish National Institute of Bioinformatics, was released to provide integrated access to data- bases and analytical tools. Since its release, the number of available services has grown dramatical- ly, and it has become one of the main contributors of registered services in the EMBRACE Biocatalogue. The ontology that enables most of the web-service compatibility has been curated, improved and extended. The service discovery has been greatly enhanced by Magallanes software and biodataSF. User data are securely stored on the main server by an authentication protocol that enables the moni- toring of current or already-finished user’s tasks, as well as the pipelining of successive data processing services. The BioMoby standard has been greatly extended with the new features included in the MOWServ, such as management of additional infor- mation (metadata such as extended descriptions, keywords and datafile examples), a qualified registry, error handling, asynchronous services and service replication. All of them have increased the MOWServ service quality, usability and robustness. MOWServ is available at http://www.inab.org/MOWServ/ and has a mirror at http://www.bitlab-es.com/MOWServ/. INTRODUCTION Diversity, heterogeneity and geographical dispersion of biological data constitute problems that hinder the poten- tial integration of such information. Therefore, research- er’s productivity is aﬀected by tedious, time-consuming and prone-to-error tasks such as searching for the appro- priate web services, collecting URLs, familiarizing them- selves with the diﬀerent service interfaces, transferring data from one service to another, formatting data for compatibility purposes or copy/paste data in web-forms with diﬀerent interfaces, to mention a few. The develop- ment of systems for interprocess communication has been previously carried out with diﬀerent goals: gathering multiple services with reliable access (1), providing access to a collection of independent analysis tools (2,3) or enabling the communication between a reduced set of tools (4–7). Standardization of bioinformatics services has also been largely analysed (8–15), standing-up over them the use of web-services designed to support automatic machine-to-machine interaction over a network, repre- senting BioMoby (16) the more successful case. In fact, the development of low-level data-interchange methods based on a speciﬁc ontology, together with the ability for wiring services to build powerful bioinformatic machines, has been revealed as the most promising solution (17) as the growing number of web-based services for integrating bioinformatic tools demonstrates. MOWServ (18), the bioinformatic platform oﬀered by the Spanish National Institute of Bioinformatics (INB), provides an integrated access to databases and analytical tools and has strongly contributed to the development of the standard BioMoby protocol (17). In this article, the *To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel: +34 952 13 2823; Fax: +34 952 13 2790; Email: ots@ac.uma.es The authors wish it to be known that, in their opinion, the ﬁrst two authors should be regarded as joint First Authors. The Author(s) 2010. Published by Oxford University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nc/2.5), which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.