Plant & Animal Genome IX Conference

Workshop: WWW
W60_01.html

INTEGRATION, ANNOTATION, AND VISUALIZATION OF DIVERSE BIOINFORMATICS DATA USING XML DATA FORMATS AND XML-BASED SOFTWARE

LabBook, Inc., McLean, VA

A major challenge in bioinformatics is the integration of heterogeneous information from various sources distributed locally and over the Internet. Scientists must be able to share and work with the results of querying diverse genomics databases in order to apply their expertise and understand the underlying biology. Query results delivered as database tables or HTML files are hard to manage and difficult to integrate. A good solution is to format query results for delivery as a standardized XML representation that is persistent and reusable. This talk will demonstrate that a combination of XML data, XML converters, and XML-aware software can facilitate the discovery process by enabling the researcher to integrate and annotate complex query results within a highly visual and interactive environment. In examples using Human Genome and expression databases together with biology-smart interfaces, the value of converting both the queries and the results into XML will be shown. The architecture of the client-server query system and information transport will be presented. XML also facilitates integration of 'extragenomic' information (literature, images, documents) with bioinformatics data for improved knowledge management. LabBook, Inc. will release its open standard XML DTD for bioinformatics and a freely available Standard Genomic XML Browser. LabBook will also announce a plan to help the worldwide research community deliver all of the distributed genome database projects in a common XML format to this biology-smart genomic viewer.