Providing Statistical Algorithms as-a-Service

In computational statistics, algorithms often have specialized implementations that address very specific problems. Every so often, these algorithms are applicable also to other problems than the original ones. Today, interest is growing towards modular and pluggable solutions that enable the repetition and validation of the experiments made by other scientists and allow the exploitation of those algorithms in other contexts. Furthermore, such procedures are requested to be remotely hosted and to "hide" the complexity of the calculations, managed by remote computational infrastructures behind the scenes. For such reasons, the usual solution of supplying modular software libraries containing implementations of algorithms is leaving the place to Web Services accessible through standard protocols and hosting such implementations. The protocols describing the computational capabilities of these Services are more and more elaborate, so that modular workflows can rely on them. We propose a Web Service, named Statistical Manager (SM) that hosts both general and special purpose algorithms implementations for statistical computing and data mining, which can be applied to a variety of biological and marine related problems.