Finding and sharing: new approaches to registries of databases and services for the biomedical sciences

Biologists currently face a daunting challenge when trying to discover which of the multitude of computational and data resources to use in analysing their results and developing their hypotheses. The basic task of identifying appropriate online resources in a research field is non-trivial and typically involves ad hoc Internet trawling, recommendations from colleagues or literature searching. This is then followed by the more complex task of establishing whether the resource is relevant, reliable, well curated, and maintained. If programmatic access is required, discovering whether this exists and how to utilize it is another challenge. As time is short, most researchers often end up using familiar resources, which are not always the best or most relevant, while the developers and funders of under-utilized but valuable resources essentially waste time and money. What is required is a solution that helps to maximize the usefulness of each resource to the overall community. At present, approaches are being developed to construct two types of registry. One type, ‘databases of databases’, deal with describing the contents and other metadata about databases. The other type, web service registries, deal with the explicit description of services available at particular sites (not always databases). We present the two areas separately, but ultimately we expect solutions to arrive that merge the two approaches.