BioMOBY

BioMOBY is a registry of web services used in bioinformatics. It allows interoperability between biological data hosts and analytical services by annotating services with terms taken from standard ontologies. BioMOBY is released under the Artistic License.

The BioMoby project began at the Model Organism Bring Your own Database Interface Conference (MOBY-DIC), held in Emma Lake, Saskatchewan on September 21, 2001. It stemmed from a conversation between Mark D Wilkinson and Suzanna Lewis during a [1] Gene Ontology developers meeting at the Carnegie Institute, Stanford, where the functionalities of the Genquire and Apollo genome annotation tools were being discussed and compared. The lack of a simple standard that would allow these tools to interact with the myriad of data-sources required to accurately annotate a genome was a critical need of both systems.

Funding for the BioMOBY project was subsequently adopted by Genome Prairie [2] (2002-2005), Genome Alberta [3](2005-date), in part through Genome Canada [4], a not-for-profit institution leading the Canadian X-omic initiatives.

There are two main branches of the BioMOBY project. One is a web-service-based approach, while the other utilizes Semantic Web technologies. This article will refer only to the Web Service specifications. The other branch of the project, Semantic Moby, is described in a separate entry.

The Moby project defines three Ontologies that describe biological data-types, biological data-formats, and bioinformatics analysis types. Most of the interoperable behaviours seen in Moby are achieved through the Object (data-format) and Namespace (data-type) ontologies.

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