| 15 | 16 | The holy grail of web service interoperability is hampered along three axes: syntax, semantics and interface. In terms of core data syntax, bioinformatics tools consume and produce data in many different formats, some of which are loosely defined syntactically (e.g. legacy flat file formats). In addition, the semantics of what we are trying to do with data, and what we mean by encoding data in a certain way, are often loosely defined. Many file formats are abused and overloaded to add semantics to fields that weren't intended for that (e.g. in comments, definition lines, key/value fields). Lastly, there is a proliferation of interfaces, each of which probably make sense on their own (e.g. RESTful APIs) but they all aren't interoperable in a way that a machine can make sense of by itself. The semantic web is technically comprised of a stack of common standards and technologies that can be applied to these three axes of syntax, semantics and interface. By adopting these common standards different service providers will be able to promote interoperability. |
