Accessing genomic data through XML-based remote procedure calls

As the amount of data in public genomic databases grows, interoperability among them is becoming an increasingly critical feature. The ability for automated systems to mine and integrate data will be crucial to extracting knowledge from sources of data whose volume far exceeds the capabilities of human researchers. The currently dominant paradigm of presenting information as Web pages and using hyperlinks to describe relationships between pieces of information favors usability, but makes interoperability and automated data exchange more difficult. In this paper we describe how SNPper, a web-based system for the retrieval and analysis of Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPS), was augmented with a Remote Procedure Call interface, allowing client applications to query our program for SNP data and to receive the response as an XML document. Data represented in this form can be easily parsed by the requesting program, and thus reused for other applications. In this paper we describe the implementation of the interface and we show examples of its usage in a number of existing applications.