Table 1.

Required metadata for service description and discovery.

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