Automating the determination of open reading frames in genomic sequences using the Web service techniques - a case study using SARS coronavirus

As more and more new genome sequences were reported nowadays, analyzing the functions of a new genome sequence becomes more and more desirable and compelling. However, the determination of the functions of a genomic sequence is not an easy task. Even with several bioinformatic tools, the task is still a labor-intensive one. This is because human experts have to intervene during the processing of using these tools. For efficiency, immediacy and reduction of human labor, a system of automating the analyzing process is proposed. We take the automated determination of open reading frames of a genomic sequence as the domain tasks that involve using a number of computational tools and interpreting the results returned from the tools. A service-oriented approach is taken, in which analyzing tools are wrapped as Web services and described in semantic Web languages including OWL and OWL-S. The SARS coronavirus genomic sequence is taken as a test case for our approaches. We are in the process of building an agent-based system for automating the tasks, in which an intelligent agent is responsible for understanding purposes of the Web services by parsing the service descriptions, and carrying out the interpretation tasks according to a workflow.