CHIMERA WEB SERVICES EXTENSIONS

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This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. Primary support for the subproject and the subproject's principal investigator may have been provided by other sources, including other NIH sources. The Total Cost listed for the subproject likely represents the estimated amount of Center infrastructure utilized by the subproject, not direct funding provided by the NCRR grant to the subproject or subproject staff. Web services provide a convenient, platform-independent way for clients to obtain services from a remotecomputer. For example, while Chimera is not distributed with large databases, users can fetch data via the web from the Protein Data Bank (PDB), the Electron Microscopy Data Bank (EMDB), and several other sources. Some useful capabilities are not yet available in Chimera because they require long computations or data resources not suitable for desktop computing, and access via web services is also problematic because long response times do not fit well with Chimera's interactive user interface. To address this limitation, we propose to deploy service oriented architecture (SOA) software that supports long-running jobs on the RBVI web servers and enables Chimera to communicate with these jobs. We will deploy the Opal Toolkit (nbcr.net/software/opal) from the National Biomedical Computation Resource (an NCRR BTRC) on the RBVI web servers to provide the server side of the architecture. We will then implement a simple interface in Chimera to access each service directly; that is, Chimera will "know" which RBVI web services are available and what parameters each service expects. In the second phase, we will implement a more powerful interface that queries the web server for descriptions of all available services, automatically generates a graphical user interface from web service metadata, and converts service output to data that can be accessed via the standard Chimera interface.