|
The following is a proposed project for Murdoch School of IT Honours programme.
A Semantic Bioinformatics Web
H.L. Hiew, Centre for Bioinformatics and Biological Computing, Murdoch University
Bioinformatics deals with the collection, organization and analysis of large amounts of biological data, using computing sciences and data network technologies. Recent advances in biological sequencing technologies have resulted an explosion in the discovery of new molecular data, spurring larged scale projects such the Human Genome Project. Such efforts hade bioinformatics an indispensible part of research and developments in medicine, agriculture, and veterinary science.
A large amount of the bioinformatics data is currently available on the World-Wide-Web (the web). This data range through an endless list from DNA, RNA and protein base sequences, to sequence feature annotations, to taxanomy, to logistic data, to research publications, to analysis programs, to user-interface components. Unfortunately most of these contents today are still designed to involve human manual manipulate, not for computer software to deal with automatically. This problem arises due to insufficient information about the content of the web resources, and inappropriate access and linking mechanisms to them.
The World-Wide-Web Consortium"s (W3C) vision of the Semantic Web offers a potential solution to this dilemma. The ultimate aim of the Semantic Web is to give "meaning" to resources on the web, that software is able to process such resources without manual intervention. The ultimate aim of the Semantic Web is to create an automated software environment. The automation can take many forms, for example:
* Collecting newly published data when they become available.
* Processing and reporting to an appropriate forum.
* Exchanging data between software agents.
|