Bio-Search Computing: integration and global ranking of bioinformatics search results.

In the Life Sciences, numerous questions can be addressed only by comprehensively searching different types of data that are inherently ordered, or are associated with ranked confidence values. We previously proposed Search Computing to support the integration of the results of search engines with other data and computational resources. This paper presents how well known bioinformatics resources can be described as search services in the search computing framework and integrated analyses over such services can be carried out. An initial set of bioinformatics services has been described and registered in the search computing framework and a bioinformatics search computing (Bio-SeCo) application using these services has been created. This current prototype application, the available services that it uses, the queries that are supported, the kind of interaction that is therefore made available to the users, and the future scenarios are here described and discussed.