A middleware-based platform for the integration of bioinformatic services

Performing Bioinformatic's experiments involve an intensive access to distributed services and information resources through Internet. Existing tools facilitate the implementation of workflow-oriented applications, however they lack of capabilities to integrate services beyond low-scale applications, particularly integrating services with heterogeneous interaction patterns and in a larger scale. On the other hand, such integration mechanisms are provided by middleware products like Enterprise Service Buses (ESB). This paper proposes an integration platform, based on enterprise middleware, 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.