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Table 1 Required metadata for service description and discovery.

From: The DBCLS BioHackathon: standardization and interoperability for bioinformatics web services and workflows

Required metadata for service description

author contact

authority identification

service version

software title or nature of algorithm (myGrid Task ontology)

software version

bandwidth and/or number of requests per minute

example input

example output and/or REGEXP to test output

some description of error-handling capacity

sync/async

nature of underlying data

organism

biological nature of data (DNA/RNA/Protein, experimental methods or platform)

input parameters and purpose of each

output parameters and purpose of each

usage/license restrictions

authentication (whether required or not)

usage statistics (as per service provider)

usage statistics (as per third party commentary)

protocol (Moby, SOAP, REST, GET, POST, etc.)

mirror servers

Ontologies that could provide the above metadata

myGrid Ontology

provides many of the annotation information elements listed above

Moby Object

provides an ontology of data-types

Moby Service

similar to myGrid's bioinformatics_task branch of the myGrid Ontology