Despite of the variety of available Web services registries specially aimed at Life Sciences, their scope is usually restricted to a limited set of well-defined types of services.While dedicated registries are generally tied to a particular format, general-purpose ones are more adherent to standards and usually rely on Web Service Definition Language (WSDL).Although D-3 WSDL is quite flexible to support common Web services types, its lack of semantic expressiveness led to various initiatives to describe Web services via ontology languages.Nevertheless, WSDL 2.0 descriptions gained a standard representation based on Web Ontology Language (OWL).
BioSWR is a novel Web services registry that provides standard Resource Description Framework (RDF) based Web services descriptions along with the traditional WSDL based ones.The registry Gas Door Cover provides Web-based interface for Web services registration, querying and annotation, and is also accessible programmatically via Representational State Transfer (REST) API or using a SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language.BioSWR server is located at http://inb.bsc.es/BioSWR/and its code is available at https://sourceforge.
net/projects/bioswr/under the LGPL license.