Enhancement of the SOAP Server in DDBJ Web Services to Process Tsunami of Biological Data

Thanks to the Internet and HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) [5], we can browse a number of biological databases and results from analytical tools that are distributed in the Web. The results are also become available in eXtensible Markup Language (XML) [7] documents at many sites in the Internet. In addition, web services [4] start prevailing in bioinformatics domain [3] following the trend in business domain. DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ) reported the implementation of the XML technology in 2002 [1] and web services in 2003 [2]. In the meantime, we recognized the need to process a long job and a large data file to cope with the tsunami of biological data. However, the SOAP server that we set up using tools in the public domain could not satisfy the requirements. Therefore, we have enhanced the SOAP server in DDBJ by use of three kinds of technologies.