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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 4669–4677Cite as

Web Services and the Semantic Web for Life Science Data

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Web services are frameworks for communication between computer applications on the World Wide Web. A general feature of “canonical” Web services is that they expose Web-based application interfaces in the form of a Web Services Description Language (WSDL) document with machine-readable content describing the input(s), output(s), and location of an application. The Semantic web extends the traditional Web by applying human and machine-readable labels to the links between resources, and encouraging those resources to be “typed” into a set of well-grounded categories, defined by shared ontologies. Machines can thus explore and process the content of the Semantic Web in meaningful ways. Moreover, the Semantic Web moves beyond simple documents and allows linking of individual data points, analytical tools, and even conceptual entities with no physical representation. Ontologiesare formal descriptions of a knowledge domain, and range from simple controlled vocabularies to...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Biomedical Informatics, Ohio State University, College of Medicine, Columbus, OH, USA

    Cartik R. Kothari

  2. University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

    Mark D. Wilkinson

Authors
  1. Cartik R. Kothari
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  2. Mark D. Wilkinson
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Cartik R. Kothari .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Louiqa Raschid

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© 2018 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature

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Kothari, C.R., Wilkinson, M.D. (2018). Web Services and the Semantic Web for Life Science Data. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_633

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