The paper explores the use of geospatial web services for querying and analytical functions on distributed heterogeneous biological databases. A case study and web service implementation was tested on biological collections in Australia. Open geospatial specifications for web services were adequate for the test implementation, although some performance issues on XML-encoded data were identified. More significantly, we highlighted the need for domain specific formats to improve their precision and content to support queries that need to determine value-based identity. We also developed analytical functions well suited to geoprocessing web services that utilised statistical summaries and localised searches versus traditional algorithms that require access to the full dataset
