Towards an Integration Platform for Bioinformatics Services

Performing in-silico experiments, which involves an intensive access to distributed services and information resources through Internet, is nowadays one of the main activities in Bioinformatics. Although existing tools facilitate the implementation of workflow-oriented applications, they lack of capabilities to integrate services beyond low-scale applications, particularly integrating ser-vices with heterogeneous interaction patterns and in a larger scale, ideally based on a Platform as a Service paradigm. On the other hand, such integration mech-anisms are provided by middleware products like Enterprise Service Buses (ESB). This paper proposes an integration platform, based on enterprise mid-dleware, to integrate Bioinformatics services. It presents a multi-level reference architecture and focuses on ESB-based mechanisms to provide asynchronous communications, event-based interactions and data transformation capabilities.