Plant & Animal Genomes XI Conference

January 11-15, 2003
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

Workshop: Bioinformatics Interfaces, Ontologies and Interoperability
            

TAIR AND BIOMOBY

TAIR, Carnegie Institution of Washington, 260 Panama St, Stanford, CA 94305, USA

The Model Organsim Databases (MODs) such as TAIR and other large biological databases were not designed with interoperability in mind. Presently, most of them use proprietary database schemas and web interfaces that either do not allow automated queries at all, or allow queries that are specific to one given database. The prerequisites for interoperability are (1) common identifiers, vocabularies and ontologies, such as GO, and, (2) common formats for querying the database and information exchange. BioMOBY (http://www.biomoby.org) addresses the second concern, in that it allows to interact with multiple sources of biological data, regardless of the underlying format or schema. Although the specifications are still in flux, some experimental bioMOBY services are already running at TAIR and elsewhere. A demonstration of some experimental services will be given, as well as information about how the current implementation of MOBY works, and what the challenges are for the MOBY project in the future.