BioMoby in Bioclipse

For the last week or so I've been working on a Bioclipse-plugin for BioMoby.

From the BioMoby homepage: "BioMoby defines an ontology-based messaging standard through which a client will be able to automatically discover and interact with task-appropriate biological data and analytical service providers, without requiring manual manipulation of data formats as data flows from one provider to the next."

In short, BioMoby structures inputs and outputs in an extendable ontology which allows services to accept and produce data in well structured ways. By adding a repository, BioMoby also allows for service lookup. The current services are focused on Bioinformatics, but there is nothing preventing us from extending with new data types for e.g. pharmacology and chemistry, and setting up new BioMoby servers with services utilizing these data types.

Using the semantic service discovery and -invokation of BioMoby from within Bioclipse will add a lot of online functionality and also possibilities. I have created a beta-version of the plugin and screenshots are available from the Bioclipse wiki. The plugin utilizes the data type ontology and autogenerates a GUI for each service on the fly, and places them in a Wizard. The plugin is currently not functional but requires some more testing. I will continue that work and the setup up a BioMoby server with some local services in pharmacology when I get back from vacation in 2 weeks.