BioMOBY/Web Services

Led By Dr. Mark Wilkinson

BioMOBY is among the most successful and visible interoperability projects in the bioinformatics domain. It is an ontology-driven communications standard that allows Bioinformatics Innovation Centre data analysis services to be discovered and accessed easily by the Innovation Centre users. Innovation Centre services themselves are also able to use the BioMOBY messaging standard to "talk" to each other without human intervention, thus enabling Innovation Centre users to pipeline data from one service to the next automatically. This is a novel paradigm for bioinformatics support provision that is being copied by international institutions such as Genome Espania and the Generation Challenge Program of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).

BioMoby provides interoperable access to nearly 1600 data and analytical resources worldwide via the BioMOBY registry (MOBY Central) hosted at the SUN Centre of Excellence.  In this way, we maximize accessibility and usefulness of biological data for our end-users, and ensure that financial investment by any one participant is leveraged against the investments of all other's.

The BioMOBY-enabled applications developed by the Innovation Centre such as Bluejay and Seahawk and others developed in collaboration with our colleagues in the myGrid project such as Taverna, allow creation and/or exploration of large ad hoc datasets, facilitate rapid and reproducible assembling of complex data analysis pipelines.  Moreover, use of BioMoby  enables BIC users to assemble boutique workflows on their own and as they see fit, with BioMoby acting as an "expert-guide" to suggest useful and appropriate services that they might want to utilize at each stage of their analysis.

Applications developed by the Innovation Centre, as well as BioMoby consortium partners, are freely available through open source licenses to ensure that Innovation Centre resources are accessible to all Genome Canada researchers and easily utilized regardless of the user's level of bioinformatics expertise. Additional expert-level training in these tools is available through the Innovation Centre training courses.