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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)