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Web Services and the Semantic Web for Life Science Data

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Encyclopedia of Database Systems

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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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Recommended Reading

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Authors and Affiliations

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

    Cartik R. Kothari & Mark D. Wilkinson

Authors
  1. Cartik R. Kothari
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  2. Mark D. Wilkinson
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    LING LIU (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. TAMER ÖZSU (Professor and Director, University Research Chair) (Professor and Director, University Research Chair)

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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Kothari, C.R., Wilkinson, M.D. (2009). Web Services and the Semantic Web for Life Science Data. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_633

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