BioCatalogue is a public, centralised, curated and monitored registry of Life Science Web services which can be used for building workflows. It is a community-oriented Web site where service providers or community experts can register and curate services and users can discover them.
BioCatalogue provides a single point where services can be annotated and curated by service providers or community experts – it helps service providers publicize and make their services more visible to the community and makes it easier for users to find them.
Web services can be volatile – they change over time and get outdated. BioCatalogue monitors services periodically and provides statistics on their availability and reliability.
Discover and reuse services in BioCatalogue from Taverna
As of version 2.1.2, Taverna has a built-in support for searching service catalogues, such as the BioCatalogue, in a form of a plugin that can be installed in the Taverna Workbench.
It enables users to browse a service catalogue and access its full search options for browsing services and checking their status and availability from inside the Workbench. Discovered services can then be added either directly to workflows or the Taverna Workbench’s Service Panel.
As of Taverna 2.3, the service catalogue plugin is an integral part of the Workbench and there is be no need for users to install it separately.
A snapshot of the Service Catalogue Perspective in Taverna can be seen in the image below.
