Metaserver

A MetaServer is a central broker providing a collated view (similar to a database view) for dispersed web resources. It is used to collect data from various web services, web pages, databases, or other online resources/repositories and then present the combined results to the client using a standard web protocol (e.g. HTTP with HTML, REST, SOAP, XML-RPC, etc.).

Styles of use

The purpose of such a system is to provide one or several of the following:

• a unified view on multiple resources
• easy comparison of the data
• standardized access to different repositories
• calibration of the data
• determining the data consensus

Example MetaServer projects

Typical, widespread implementations of MetaServers are:

• Meta-Search-Engines
• DNS MetaServers
• Protein Structure and Function Prediction Gateways
• Computer Game MetaServers
• Text Mining MetaServers (e.g. BioCreative Metaserver - BCMS)