A Multi-level Biomedical Ontology-enabled Broker: Dynamic Service-based Data Source Integration

Abstract

Web services have recently become a new trend for gathering biomedical information. However, it is not easy to integrate and obtain a concise/complete query result among thousands of service operations. In this dissertation, we propose a multi-level ontology-enabled service broker system for dynamically integrating web services in the biomedical domain (BioServiceBroker). By introducing multi-level modeling concepts and intra/inter level relationships, our approach facilitates more accurate modeling of biomedical ontologies, which leads to a better understanding of the data stored in various biological data sources as well as the services provided by the data sources. In addition, we incorporate temporal concepts with new enhanced QoS measures, which allow service requesters to control more querying factors in order to precisely invoke corresponding service operations. We also define a Unified Biomedical Service Interface (UBSI) as a proposed service deployment standard.

The multi-level ontology-enabled service broker system can be combined with other mediator systems for cross referencing the diverse bioinformatics sources and can also be utilized in other application domains. Our ultimate goal is to construct a public, scalable, and interoperable biomedical service platform based on UBSI to benefit scientists in data searching and publishing.