A Framework for Building Reliable Distributed Bioinformatics Service Repositories

The reliability is a major factor that limits the success of promising service oriented architecture in bioinformatics. To evaluate services reliability and availability and create indicators of quality of service, we have defined an XML format designed to exchange service status reports. We demonstrate the interest of sharing status reports between service consumers and producers by providing two example applications, a workflow management system plug-in and a Web report generator. Furthermore, we describe the framework that we use to distribute quality of service management features, QBIOS. QBIOS enables service test case creation, scheduled execution and monitoring. We illustrate the use of our open test strategy at the level of a group of scientific partners sharing bioinformatics services.