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
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)
